The European Conservative, No. 8

THE EUROPEAN

CONSERVATIVE Issue 8 • Summer 2013

From Equality to Privilege Gudrun Kugler Equality has become a major principle of political and legal thinking. Equality before the law, which was achieved by liberation movements over centuries, has turned into equality of moral choices, equality in statistics of how men and women live, and equality of how individuals treat each other. These understandings deviate quite far from the original meaning of equality before the law, which we rightly hold on to. Yet, this development remains largely unchallenged. And it is currently seen in the harsh antidiscrimination legislation proposed at the EU-level—and at the level of many European countries.

Such legislation was recently debated in Austria; but it failed to get final approval. In the end, Rudolf

Hundstorfer, the Austrian Minister of Social Affairs, angrily withdrew a draft proposal for an equal treatment bill that would have extended the prohibition of unequal treatment due to “religion and belief, age or sexual orientation” to the area of the provision of goods and services including housing.

A similar proposal had been earlier rejected by the Austrian Parliament in early 2011; but in the summer of 2012, Hundstorfer, a Social Democrat, put forward the same bill to the same Parliament in the same legislative period for a second time. His party, of course, cheered the bill. But how it managed to also receive the support of the Minister of Economy, Dr. Reinhold Mitterlehner, and the President of Continued on p. 2

Sweden’s Multicultural Failure Tino Sanandaji On 13 May, the Stockholm police received calls from the blighted immigrant suburb of Husby. Residents were frightened by a 69-year-old man who was wielding a kitchen knife.

Following a standoff that is currently under investigation, the elderly Portuguese immigrant was shot dead.

One week later, the police were called to Husby once more. This time, residents reported that masked men were torching cars with gasoline and Molotov cocktails. When the police and firefighters arrived, they were met with a barrage of rocks.

Each morning the following week, Sweden awoke to fresh images of arson and rioting. Rumors of racism and police brutality ignited

riots in other immigrant suburbs already ripe with resentment toward Swedish society. The police managed to quell the riots only after calling in reinforcements from other Swedish cities. The extent of the material damage was some 200 cars set on fire, in addition to a number of burned schools (including a nursery) and cultural centers. This toll does not include the psychological cost of a bruised Swedish self-image.

Not many years ago, Sweden was among the world’s most ethnically homogeneous nations. Today, the country takes in more immigrants relative to its population than the U.S. did at the peak of the transatlantic migration. Sweden has about 9 million Continued on p. 6

Contents From Equality to Privilege .................... 1 Gudrun Kugler Sweden’s Multicultural Failure .............. 1 Tino Sanandaji Property Rights—and Wrongs ............. 8 Karl-Peter Schwarz The Sources of Extremism ................. 12 João Carlos Espada Promoting Liberal Learning ................ 16 Emma Cohen de Lara Conservatism & the Liberal Mind ...... 18 Nils August Andresen Europe’s Euthanasia Expansion ........ 22 Wesley J. Smith Are Human Rights Helpful? ............... 26 Christiaan Alting von Geusau Reflections on Multiculturalism ......... 32 Frits Bolkestein Dietrich v. Hildebrand & Europe ...... 37 Denis Kitzinger Local Autonomy, States & the EU ..... 40 Robert Nef Lady Thatcher, R.I.P. ........................... 43 André P. DeBattista The Fate of the Book ........................... 45 Anthony Daniels A Czech View of Conservatism ......... 49 Roman Joch

A publication of the Center for European Renewal

Kugler, cont’d. the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, Dr. Christoph Leitl, both members of the more conservative Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party or ÖVP), remains incomprehensible.

In the end, however, pressure from Austrian entrepreneurs who would have been affected by the proposed law, as well resistance from civil society groups and clear opposition from the Catholic Church, along with opposition from certain liberal forces within the ÖVP, brought about the downfall of the bill.

For now in Austria the issue is off the table. But Hundstorfer’s bill is exactly the same as the law that has been on hold as a directive in Brussels since 2008. There, apparently without any substantial objections from Austria, it awaits a change of government in Germany, which is currently not willing to accept such restrictions on personal freedom.

The first four EU Equal Treatment Directives, which are already binding for the entire European Union, prohibit discrimination in the area of employment—“only” for the private sector. The proposed fifth EU Equal Treatment Directive, which would extend the ban on discrimination to the provision of goods and services in the private sector, has not yet been met with approval—and for good reason: It would have dramatic consequences. It is time for Austria to withdraw its support from the fifth EU Equal Treatment Directive.

Entrepreneurial Freedom?

Just like the now-buried Austrian draft proposal, the proposal for the EU’s fifth Equal Treatment Directive is nothing but unacceptable patronization. If implemented, entrepreneurial freedom, especially for small businesses, would turn from the rule to an exception. Compliance with such a directive would be expensive and time-consuming; and correspondence with customers and new marketing strategies would frequently have to be cleared with attorneys.

The main point of contention is the prohibition of unequal treatment

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in the provision of goods and services by the private sector—on the grounds of religion or belief, age or sexual orientation. If such a law were to become reality, a Jewish hotel owner, for example, would be obliged to rent out his assembly rooms to a Muslim society; a homosexual would not be able to sublet his house only to homosexuals; and a private rail traffic company would not be allowed to give exclusive discounts to the elderly. In addition, a Catholic dating agency that specialised in bringing

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) painted by Allan Ramsay. Oil on canvas (1766).

Why would a graphic designer, a photographer and a pastry chef not want to work for the celebration of a civil partnership? Not because they reject homosexuals but because they do not want to support such a marriage-like event due to religious beliefs and reasons of conscience.

Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) has written: “I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”

Differential treatment could be legitimized if a judge deemed it “appropriate and necessary.”

The consequence would be private entrepreneurship regulated by judges, implying costly lawsuits and a lack of legal certainty, impeding long-term business planning. Such a proposed reversal of the burden of proof contradicts our legal system and presents further difficulties. Instead of the “benefit of the doubt,” the equal treatment legislation would allow only for the “benefit of the victim of discrimination.” Times are hard enough for small businesses, so why impose additional constraints?

For the government itself, ensuring compliance with these regulations imposes a significant additional effort. And, in the end, all of this would be paid for by society at large.

together people who share the same faith would have to open its doors to people of other faiths; an Eastern European family that had once fled from a Communist regime might have to rent out their apartment to a party official of the Communist Party; and a couple, whose daughter had been estranged through the scheming of a radical sect, would not be able to reject a member of that sect as a renter of an apartment in their house.

There are further examples: An evangelical graphic designer would have to design an invitation for the celebration of a same-sex union if requested; in addition, a Christian photographer would have to take pictures, a Christian pastry chef would have to bring a special cake created for the event, and so on and so forth.

Consequences of Prohibition A recent incident is illustrative: A Christian religious high official was recently looking for a secretary. His legal advisor wisely asked the Commission for Equal Treatment before publishing the job advertisement: Would they be able to reject a headscarf-wearing Muslim woman? The answer was “no”.

On the basis of the first four Equal Treatment Directives, European law allows a distinction due to religion in church employment only when there is a “genuine, legitimate and justified occupational requirement,” such as when it comes to preaching to the faithful. But just imagine if a member of this Christian official’s church entered his office: The obviously Muslim lady in the reception area

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could create quite a bit of confusion.

In the end, this particular church dignitary decided not to publish the job advertisement, choosing instead to look for someone unofficially.

The many local people qualified for the job who never had the chance to apply paid the price for the system of anti-discrimination legislation.

Extending the prohibition of discrimination to the private sector would thus have similar consequences. Services that are publically advertised today would seek to reach their customers in less public ways—and other potential customers would never hear of them.

This would cause a rise in prices and “protected groups” might get shunned due to fear of lawsuits. And, in the end, it is the consumer who pays for such legislation.

Though it may sound surprising at first, it is important that discriminatory behaviour be permissible in the market, despite its possible immorality or social undesirability. Granted, a rejected customer must look for another provider of the service being sought.

But this hardship ought to be borne in the name of freedom—including the freedom to take wrong or unpleasant decisions. This complies with Voltaire’s notion of tolerance: being of an entirely different opinion but at the same time defending the other one’s right to their view “until one’s last breath.”

It is with this idea that we are all encouraged to learn to live with the imperfect behaviour of other people.

So is it really the government’s job to enforce an alleged advancement of society through educational laws and a police force? How much does the legislature believe its citizens to be in need of education and guidance?

Regardless of the response, too often, socially and morally motivated legislation leads to dishonesty and lawlessness.

Business or Belief Equal treatment and antidiscrimination legislation is usually phrased in an impartial way. But practice shows that it is very often Christians who are taken to court

under such laws. Some examples: A Spaniard paid €12,000 in administrative penalties because he was not willing to make his restaurant available for the celebration of a samesex union; a couple in Britain running a private bed and breakfast had to pay up to €4,000 in compensation because they denied a double room to a homosexual couple; a Christian dating agency in the U.S. was forced to add the search option, “I am a man looking for a man.”

Equal treatment laws thus create irresolvable moral conflicts for Christians by forcing them to choose between their belief and their business. In some countries, equal treatment laws carry administrative penalties; in others, they impose compensation fees. Explanatory materials accompanying such laws often warn of “painfully high” fines.

Thus, in practice, the prohibition of discrimination in the provision of goods and services can cause an insoluble dilemma: to quit one’s job or one’s religion.

Experience has shown that equal treatment laws also lead to strategically motivated lawsuits. In the UK, it is a common occurrence that radical lobbies look for interaction with companies led by people with convictions conflicting with the law— for example, practicing Christians— with the plan of launching lawsuit.

Litigation associations readily provide support: They receive parts of the compensation fees and use this money to seek further lawsuits. The higher the compensation fees, the more remunerative the role of the victim.

Are Such Laws Necessary?

The great political philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755) advised that if it was not necessary to make a law, it was necessary not to make one. According to him, laws have to be necessary, adequate and proportionate. This is not the case with equal treatment laws. Despite their egalitarian wording, they create privileges for certain groups. Of course, bestowing privileges upon one group of people can be necessary in certain situations; but the reasons have to be very compelling.

Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet

by Jesse Norman (HarperCollins, 2013): Burke has been the subject of several new studies published in the past year. But Norman, a Tory MP, offers one of the best. Full of anecdotes and interesting details, Norman is able to use key passages from Burke’s many speeches and writings, without falling into heavy academic writing. Burke’s life-long fight against the evils of ideology and the tyrannical abuse of power are examined, as well as his prescient views on the French Revolution. The book provides readers with a comprehensive consideration of Burke’s intellectual abilities, rhetorical skills, moral imagination, and personality—providing a better understanding of why Burke is considered to be not only one of the greatest political thinkers of the 18th century but the father of conservatism.

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In the course of the debate in Austria, there was talk of the possibility that a homosexual man might be hindered from entering a night club. If this were actually the case, one could show solidarity by not visiting the club anymore—and by suggesting that others do the same.

If such a boycott was not successful but, instead, the problem spread even more, should we not then discuss incentives and disincentives, and plan public awareness campaigns? Only if discrimination against a particular group is so widespread and strong should temporary restrictions be considered as the way to get it under control—and then, only within the limit of safeguarding freedom of religion. The burden of proof of such a necessity, however, lies with the supporters of equal treatment laws.

In people’s minds, antidiscrimination laws in the provision of goods and services are often legitimized by imagining a monopoly situation: the only hotel, the only fountain, etc., in the desert. In most legal systems, however, and certainly in European countries, monopoly situations are already regulated for all customers in a satisfactory manner—no matter what “group” they belong to.

On Hold in Brussels Back to the curtailed fifth EU Equal Treatment Directive: What is not succeeding at the EU-level is being tried nationally. The attention of lobbying groups has shifted towards what is called “leveling up”—transposing a not-yet agreed upon EU-directive into national law first. For the inattentive national decision-maker, the difference fades away into a vague but common “Brussels wants it” mentality. It is important to point out that currently there are no European Union obligations—zero—to adopt an antidiscrimination law in the provision of goods and services on the grounds of religion and belief, age and sexual orientation.

What’s the future of the fifth Equal Treatment Directive? Will Austria give its consent? This question touches the heart of democracy and there is no national consensus in favor

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of such equal treatment legislation.

Yet Austria seems prepared to give its consent to this law in Brussels— something which could result in the law having binding power over the entire European Union. The decision seems to depend solely upon the ministry in charge, which is currently controlled by a particular political party.

Thus, politically-motivated civil servants take socio-political decisions of vast dimensions and become more powerful than national parliaments.

For the most part, we do not know their names. There is no public

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) as portrayed by Émile Bayard in Grands Hommes et Grands Faits de la Révolution Française, 1789-1804 (1889).

debate on the issue. There is nothing else for us to do but to invoke their sense of responsibility not to consent to something in Brussels which was not agreed upon in Austria. But that’s all one can do. This is very worrying.

The Equal Treatment Directive The Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry recently raised its voice against the EU’s fifth Equal Treatment Directive saying that it would bring about “additional administrative burdens” and “less legal certainty.” They also mentioned as reasons to oppose the Directive the restrictions on freedom, the “factual discrimination of people who do not fit the criteria” and the

simple lack of a problem significant enough to require such a law.

Further, the Zentralverband des Deutschen Handwerks (Central Association of the German Skilled Crafts Trades or ZDH) objects strongly to the directive: “Massive intrusions in the constitutional freedom of contract and the freedom to conduct a business are bound to occur. In the future the entrepreneur will have to make sure that he and his employees respect the prohibition of discrimination while contacting customers and prospects, from the greeting to information and product offers, the conditions, the counseling interview or the negotiation up to the point of closing the deal. Not only does this create a mass of bureaucratic burdens and legal uncertainty, it can also result in situations where companies avoid legal deals with people who are possible victims of discrimination in order to avoid allegedly imminent legal trials. The intention of the proposed directive to integrate could reverse into the opposite.”

Germany’s Centrum für Europäische Politik (Centre for European Policy or CEP) similarly fears a general “obligation to enter into contract” as the result of exceptional cases and goes on to talk about a “threatening with state intervention” aimed at a “re-education of society.”

A Right to Non-Discrimination?

Non-discrimination and equal treatment are often discussed as if they were requirements of human rights. But this is quite far from the truth. The prohibition of discrimination in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 2) and in the European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 14) refer only to the rights enumerated in the respective documents. This is equivalent to the principle of equality before the law, which is essential to our legal systems. In addition, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art. 26), nondiscrimination refers to the law in general—but not to the relationship of private people or entrepreneurs amongst each other.

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The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Art. 21) phrases the principle in a more comprehensive way. The European Court of Justice has not yet interpreted Art. 21, but even if Art. 21 were understood as a substantial right instead of as a mere principle of interpretation of the pronounced rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights is not universally applicable: It binds EU institutions and member states only when they apply EU law.

In a nutshell: Nowhere is there to be found a human right to be treated equally by other people. On the contrary, it is equal treatment laws that restrict human rights: The private autonomy of every person is the foundation of—and the reason for—human rights.

After all, human rights are the soil in which are embedded personal freedoms. The freedom to conduct one’s business emanates from the right to property (whose restrictions need to be necessary, adequate and proportionate)—which, in turn, means that the government must not interfere in personal decisions.

Furthermore, equal treatment legislation encroaches on freedom of religion and freedom of conscience— by requiring a businessperson to offer his services in a way that cannot be squared with his religion or conscience.

In the Austrian debate on the 2012 equal treatment bill, it was often argued that “the UN recommended” such a law. Upon more detailed scrutiny, the alleged argument of “UN recommendations” did not support what they claimed. What was being talked about was the result of the universal periodic review of human rights through the UN Human Rights Council, consisting of 47 countries. Dozens of measures are routinely recommended—but not by “the UN” as a whole but by individual countries. Only a small number of countries had demanded an expansion of the Austrian discrimination ban: Honduras, Canada, UK, Norway—and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Of course, Canada and UK each have their own political agendas when it comes to anti-discrimination

legislation. Honduras and Norway, in turn, might want to stand out by taking a pro-active stance. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, is a surprise. Perhaps Iran should stop putting homosexual people in prison before offering anti-discrimination advice to Austria.

Thus, the alleged UN recommendation is, in fact, not the opinion of the international community but merely non-binding proposals by certain individual states.

In no way do they dictate legislation nor are they a substitute for a national parliamentary process. The question then arises whether the UN Human Rights Council oversteps its competency knowingly and deliberately—or in error. Regardless of the response, neither sheds a good light on the Council.

A la Recherche d’Égalite Perdu Equality has become a largely unquestioned dictum of our time: equality as a conditio sine qua non for social stability and personal tolerance.

Those who do not accept limits to thought are called to challenge this perception.

Excessive equal treatment legislation looks like a therapy which generates the very disease it purports to treat. According to a 2009 Eurobarometer poll, it is the Swedes who feel most—and the Turks who feel least—discriminated against. It thus seems that anti-discrimination laws produce bigger problems than the original problems were in themselves. That in itself is reason enough to reject them.

There can be no doubt: The promoters of anti-discrimination laws will not give up their efforts to create more “victims” of discrimination.

And, in the process, they will slowly erode at all our freedoms until we have lost it all. Historically, such freedoms were hard-won. We ought not give them up so carelessly.

Dr. Kugler is a professor at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria. She is co-founder and director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians (www.intoleranceagainstchristians. eu) in Vienna, Austria.

Biografías Políticas by Carlos Dardé, José María Marco, and Luis Arranz Notario (FAES, 2013): This is a three-volume set of biographies of some of Spain’s most important thinkers: Antonio Cánovas (1828-1897), Antonio Maura (1853-1925), and Francisco Silvela (1843-1905).

Written by three contemporary scholars and published by the Fundacion para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (Foundation for Social Analyses and Studies), this set provides an overview of the each of these 19th century thinkers. Cánovas was one of Spain’s greatest conservative politicians, historians, and essayists. He is essential for understanding the evolution of Spanish liberalism and the emergence of modern Spain. Maura was a leading figure of the Spanish Restoration who wrote about democracy and the monarchy. And Silvela was a key figure in the growth of the liberal-conservative tradition in Spain.

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Sanandaji, cont’d. inhabitants and last year took in almost 90,000 immigrants, excluding Swedes returning from abroad. NonWestern immigrants were 1% of Sweden’s population in 1980 and have since increased to 10% of the population.

Today, 60% of total welfare payouts in Sweden go to immigrants.

Problems such as child poverty, which the welfare state was supposed to have solved, are reemerging as a consequence of immigration.

Second-generation immigrants born in Sweden remain less likely to work or graduate from college than are the children of natives. The only reason the welfare state remains solvent is that an astonishing 85% of workingage native Swedes work and pay taxes, far above the European average of 70%. By contrast, only half of nonWestern immigrants work.

While immigrant unemployment is high, recent unrest can hardly be blamed on austerity. Successive governments have poured billions into problem areas in public investments, with limited success. In addition to free health care and other services, a family of four in Sweden is entitled to around $3,000 in welfare benefits each month. Last year, every middleschool pupil in one of Husby’s public schools received a brand-new iPad. (A total of 2,300 tablets have been distributed to local schools.)

Nor is Islam the cause of the riots.

Radical Islamism is a problem, but it’s not related to this unrest. Most rioters appeared to be secular, even atheist.

Some were Christian Assyrians.

Frankly, most young immigrants in Sweden today do not care much about Islam. A far more potent influence

than Islam on the Swedish ghetto is American gangster rap.

So why has Sweden failed to integrate immigrants despite extraordinary tolerance and generosity? I suspect that the answer lies in unconditional tolerance itself.

Immigrants who have recently arrived lack country-specific human capital.

This includes language skills, labormarket experience, and cultural knowledge. In the United States, recent immigrants typically earn less than natives do, but they experience faster wage growth as they accumulate work experience and skills. Immigrants eventually tend to catch up.

In the Swedish welfare state, people live comfortably even if they are unemployed. This means that few are willing to accept low-paying or disagreeable work, preferring to live on welfare until something better shows up. But immigrants who never enter the labor market rarely catch up to natives in skills.

Immigrants who do not enter the labor market remain isolated from Swedish society. Integration is not only a question of work. It is also about getting to know the natives and learning their customs. This is difficult for unemployed immigrants, who tend to live in segregated areas and often have not once set foot in the home of a native Swede. The generosity of Swedish welfare thus paradoxically traps many immigrants in permanent exclusion from the labor market and, by extension, from society. In segregated neighborhoods, not working eventually becomes the norm through social osmosis, creating a vicious cycle that carries on into the next generation.

Economic factors tell only half the story, however.

Multiculturalism itself is an even bigger impediment to integration. Multiculturalism teaches that natives have no moral right to impose their culture on immigrants.

Instead, immigrants are encouraged to cling to the culture of their home country. This approach Three cars set on fire in the Stockholm suburb of Husby during the impedes integration into second day of riots. Photograph courtesy of Telefonkiosk (2013). both the Swedish way

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of life and the Swedish economy.

The Swedish establishment has embraced multiculturalism perhaps more wholeheartedly than any other country has.

Multiculturalism may be wellintentioned, but it has disastrous consequences. It is simply not true that Afghan culture equips one for success in the West as much as Swedish culture does. Some integration naturally occurs despite multiculturalism, but the overall failure is hard to deny.

Even second-generation immigrants do not fully integrate, if we measure in terms of fundamental cultural traits such as interpersonal trust.

Resentment toward the West, fostered by the public discourse endlessly reciting the West’s historical sins such as racism and colonialism, makes integration harder. The problem with this discourse is not that the West is innocent of these crimes; it is not. The problem is that the blame-the-West interpretation of world history is onesided. Immigrants learn—and make use of—the message of victimhood, which fosters hostility toward their host society. And claiming victim status is appealing from a psychological perspective, as it confers moral superiority. Immigrants who wish to integrate and adopt a Swedish identity are accused of “acting white” or being “an Uncle Tom.” (The latter is not a translation from Swedish; the American phrase “Uncle Tom” is the actual term of abuse.)

In the face of this litany of crimes, Swedes have developed a deep sense of collective guilt and consequently lack the cultural self-confidence to integrate immigrants. The former leader of the Social Democratic opposition famously stated: “I believe that this is why Swedes are jealous of immigrants. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you together. What do we have?

We have Midsummer’s Eve and other lame things.” Not to be outdone in the department of self-abasement, the current right-of-center prime minister added: “The fundamentally Swedish is merely barbarism. The rest of development has come from outside.”

Note that this fierce hostility toward Swedish culture does not originate

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with Muslim immigrants; it comes from Swedish elites, including liberals to the left and libertarians to the right. Swedish libertarians are, if possible, even more militantly hostile toward Sweden as a nation-state and to the very notion of patriotism.

Cultural self-confidence is essential for integration, since integrating immigrants inevitably involves some willingness to assert majority culture.

Furthermore, the gravitational force of a strong and identifiable national identity in fact facilitates integration. In Sweden today – unlike in many other EU countries, there are no integration requirements for immigrants, and thus, no social contract wherein Swedes accept immigrants as one of their own once certain obligations are fulfilled.

It is this contradiction between reality and elite ideology that is tearing Sweden apart. The political and media elites may love or at least pretend to love the new multiculturalist society, but polls show that the Swedish public was never particularly enthusiastic about it.

A recent study found that most native Swedes never socialize with immigrants or do so only rarely. Elites can dictate policy, but they cannot force ordinary Swedes to accept immigrants who have not integrated into their culture.

From the point of view of immigrants, therefore, the Swedish state is warm and generous, but Swedish society is cold and distant. The more Sweden spends on integrationspolitik, the worse things appear to become.

Sweden takes in more immigrants than almost any other country, but immigrants do not feel welcome here.

In response to failed integration, the establishment has redoubled its efforts to push multiculturalism down Sweden’s throat, blaming the Swedish people for the failure of integrationist policies.

Keep in mind that Sweden was never an easy country to integrate into culturally, and icy Scandinavia generally was never a particularly well-chosen testing ground for the multiculturalist experiment. As a Kurd from Iran, I felt more accepted in American society as a foreign student in Chicago than I ever did growing up in Sweden from the age of nine. I quite enjoyed being a Kurd and had little desire to become

a Swede, so this was not a problem for me. But the feeling of permanent exclusion can be a serious problem for those without the luxury of developing a more cosmopolitan identity.

Even those children of immigrants who are born and raised in Sweden lack a clear path to integrate into their country. The resentment fueling the riots is not material poverty, which is limited in Sweden. The underlying cause is social inequality. Those who look distinctly foreign remain secondclass citizens in Sweden, especially if they live in Husby and speak with a ghetto accent.

The state can hand out welfare benefits and iPads, but it cannot force Swedes to treat foreigners as equals in daily interaction. The rioting youths may not be able to articulate the cause of their anger, but no one is fooled about their place in the social hierarchy.

Immigrants will never achieve social equality as long as official policy is based on cultural segregation, which means that the next round of riots is only a matter of time.

Conservative Americans might experience schadenfreude when they witness recent events in Sweden. Ever since the days of Gunnar Myrdal, Swedes have been lecturing Americans that social democracy offers the optimal path to integrating minorities (Sweden at the time conveniently had no minorities to integrate).

Swedish arrogance is now temporarily checked, at least until the smoke over Stockholm clears.

Still, Americans should temper their urge toward self-congratulation. The problems Sweden faces in trying to integrate immigrants also exist in the U.S. In both countries, the multicultural ethic means that people are scolded for highlighting any facts that might be perceived as unflattering to minorities.

In the wake of the riots, Sweden is engaging in overdue self-examination about the problem of integrating immigrants. American conservatives are well advised to do the same.

Mr. Sanandaji holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago and is a research fellow at the Institute for Industrial Economics in Stockholm. © 2013 by National Review, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Ny Vind Over Norge: 16 Artikler om Frihet og Ansvar, edited by Hanne Nabintu Herland (Dreyers Forlag, 2013): This collection of sixteen essays brings together some of the newest liberal-conservative thinkers in Norway. Focusing on everything from relationships, love, Europe, the failure of the Left and the meaning of conservatism, the authors are united by their criticism of the role of the state in all aspects of Norwegian life, and they ask why individual freedom and private initiative are not defended by more people. In general, the authors argue that Sweden is losing its historical roots and forgetting its ethical ideals— precisely those factors which previously made the nation competitive, successful, and vibrant. With essays by Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, Conservative MP, and Nils August Andresen, editor of Minerva, this collection is a fascinating look at Norwegian conservatism—and gives hope that a renewal of culture in Norway may be brought about by the next generation.

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Property Rights—and Wrongs Karl-Peter Schwarz On 27 June 1996, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly adopted Resolution No. 1096—on measures to dismantle the legacy of the former Communist totalitarian systems. At the time, some MEPs warned of the dangers of a failed transition to market economics: “At best, oligarchy will reign instead of democracy, corruption instead of the rule of law, and organized crime instead of human rights.

At worst, the result could be the ‘velvet restoration’ of a totalitarian regime, if not a violent overthrow of the fledgling democracy.”

But regarding the restitution of property stolen by Communist regimes the Assembly advised “that property, including that of the churches, which was illegally or unjustly seized by the state, nationalized, confiscated or otherwise expropriated during the reign of communist totalitarian systems in principle be restituted to its original owners in integrum, if this is possible, without violating the rights of current owners who acquired the property in good faith or the rights of tenants who rented the property in good faith, and without harming the progress of democratic reforms. In cases where this is not possible, just material compensation should be awarded.”

Seventeen years later, the post-communist countries present a bleak picture. The problem of property restitution has nowhere been satisfactorily resolved. Even the most “Western” countries— let’s say the Czech Republic or the reunited Germany—discriminate against the rightful owners in the name of a revolutionary volonté général, particularly if they belonged to the former aristocracy.

Instead of full property restitution, as called for by the Parliamentary Assembly, we have witnessed nearly everywhere a process called “privatization” in which former Communist cadres, their offspring,

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and their cronies have appropriated in full or in considerable part what had earlier been “nationalized” by the Communist regime.

EU member states like Romania and Bulgaria are now ruled by oligarchs who have roots in the old nomenklatura and the secret services of the communist regime. Their economic power consists largely of stolen property.

The denial of a full restitution has not only infringed the rights of the original owners, but has contributed to the emergence of allegedly free but deeply corrupt and demoralized societies—with the complicity of European institutions like the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

On 30 May 2012, the Department for the Execution of Judgments of the ECHR sent a memorandum to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe regarding “the ineffectiveness of the mechanism set up to allow the restitution of or the compensation for properties nationalized during the Communist regime” in Romania. With more than a thousand cases pending, the Court obliged Romania to take “measures capable of providing adequate redress to all those affected by the reparation laws . . . within 18 months.” In its assessment of a new draft reparation law presented by the Romanian government, the memorandum of the ECHR affirmed that “the State is entitled to expropriate property—including any compensatory entitlement granted by legislation—and to reduce, even substantially, levels of compensation under legislative schemes.”

Furthermore, “reducing the compensation below the market value is acceptable and even suggested by the European Court in the pilot judgment, as a measure that might help to strike a fair balance between the interests of former owners and the general interest of the community.” Thus,

instead of demanding the full restitution of illegally confiscated property, the ECHR affirmed the “right” of the Romanian state to expropriate further in the “general interest of the community.”

Nationalization, expropriation, and confiscation are not features specific to Communism. Between 1913 and 1923, about 3 million people were victims of population transfers and confiscations in Europe: approximately 900,000 Muslims, Greeks, and Bulgarians during and after the Balkan wars of 1912-1913; 160,000 Bulgarians and Greeks after the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919; 1.6 million Turks and Greeks after the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. In France, under the presidency of Georges Clemenceau, 150,000 mostly assimilated Germans were selected by a governmental commission (commission du triage) and forced to leave Alsace. [In order to speed up the whole process, anybody who denounced his neighbor as a “German” could apply to get his property.] If you also consider the 800,000 Germans who left Poland and the 425,000 Hungarians who left Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia after World War I, you could say the new Wilsonian world order eventually denied homestead and property to approximately 4-5 million people.

But this was only the “democratic prelude” to the forced population transfers under the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin between 1938 and 1944, which affected probably more than seven million people (this figure does not include the 5-6 million victims of the shoa). However, the biggest population transfers in Europe occurred at the end of World War II through 1948 and it affected more than twice as many people: 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe, and 4 million Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Italians. About 2

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million people died during those transfers—not during the war but after.

The Communists contributed to these crimes but they were by no means the only perpetrators. In the case of Czechoslovakia, the Communists were even rather reluctant to support efforts when democratic President Edvard Beneš presented his plan to expel 3 million Germans—a quarter of the population—and confiscate their property. His presidential decrees initiated a period of ethnic cleansing immediately after the war. The country’s national and social revolution was nearly accomplished when the Communists finally ousted the democratic parties in February 1948.

Already, about 80% of Czechoslavakia’s economy had been nationalized in 1945 and 1946.

Immediately after the war, Beneš ordered the nationalization of all banks, all insurance companies, and about 3,000 companies in all industrial branches. The Germans who were expelled left 5.68 million acres of fields and forests behind.

Most of their confiscated property was first divided among Czech and Slovak settlers, then collectivized— like many other businesses—after the Communist takeover. From the 1950s until 1989, even groceries and flower shops were run by the government.

Why is it so important to understand that nationalization and confiscation were not just a Communist feature? Because the restitution laws set somewhat arbitrary time limits. In the case of the Czech and Slovak republics, the magical threshold was 25 February 1948, the day of the coup in Prague.

If your property had been robbed by the Communists after this date, you could try to get it back. But if it had been robbed by democrats the day before, you had no chance of ever recovering it. Instead of giving it back to its legitimate owners the property was “privatized.”

The only way to truly redress such injustices would have been to implement a real and fair restitution

without restrictions, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, language, or religion. Instead, the postCommunist states excluded the broad majority of owners and their heirs from restitution, and divided the property among a new class of nouveaux riches, mostly from the rank and file of the former nomenklatura.

Incredibly, the European Union excluded the monitoring of national legislation on property and restitution from the political criteria for membership during the integration process. It is obvious that all this happened against the

The late Franz Ulrich, 11th Prince Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau (1936-2009).

Photograph courtesy of CTK and Radio Praha.

rule of law—and against what John Locke wrote: “Government can never have a power to take to themselves the whole, or any part of the subject’s property, without their own consent.”

The fact is that confiscation is prohibited by international law.

In 1938, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded prompt compensation for lands seized from US farmers and ranchers in Mexico. Hull underlined that “under every rule of law and equity, no government is entitled to expropriate private property, for whatever purpose without provisions for prompt, adequate and effective payment thereof.”

Since then, the “Hull formula” has become part of many bilateral and multilateral treaties.

According to international law, confiscation without compensation is simply theft. When the taking of property is considered an unlawful expropriation, compensation should also cover lost future profits (lucrum cersans) in addition to the loss actually suffered (damnum energens). Nothing of the sort happened in the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

The denial or restriction of restitution has many negative consequences. First of all, it violates the rule of law and undermines the legal order. The acquisition from the government of stolen assets in the course of privatization is not a legitimate transaction; it is fencing for a low cash price. In most cases, it lands in the hands of former Communists who easily compensate their loss of formal political power with state capture and economic dominance, which in turns leads to still greater distortions of competition and still more graft and corruption.

Communists are still in power everywhere in Eastern Europe. Sometimes they call themselves Socialists or Social Democrats, sometimes liberals or even conservatives. Only the old Communist relationship between state and corporations has been inverted. Before, it was the party and the state which organized the economy; now, networks of oligarchs control states, governments, judiciary, and political parties.

Along with Big Government, the corrupting effect of mass democracy and the increasing burden of the welfare state, this is the most serious limitation of liberty in post-Communist Europe.

Post-Communist oligarchies represent a collective security risk as well. They can be—and are—used

by Russia which has been trying to regain the influence it once had in this part of Europe.

There are only a few examples of restitution in the case of

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the aristocracy which opposed Nazism during the war. A former Socialist minister of culture in the Czech Republic once explained this in the following way: “The current aristocracy in this country is basically an occupying force.

They all arrived after the battle of the White Mountain.” The battle mentioned occurred in November 1620. The Catholics defeated the Protestants and the aristocrats from the Catholic countries settled in Bohemia. Accordingly, the descendants of the Norman conquerors could be regarded as an occupying force in England, too.

The late Franz Ulrich, 11th Prince Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau, born in 1936, as a child received the entail (fideicomissum) of the fortune of his family. His father, who died in 1938, had only been the trustee, administrator, and limited beneficiary of the entail but not its owner. In 1940, Prince Kinsky’s mother emigrated with her children to Argentina. After her death, among her papers, he found his original Czechoslovakian passport from his childhood, the basis on which his Czech citizenship was confirmed and the corresponding certificates issued. He used this to file property restitution claims against the government.

The first five of 157 claims were successful. In 2003, the Czech civil courts confirmed that the State had assumed ownership without due legal ground. But then the Socialist minister of culture sounded the alarm. Politicians from all political parties got together for a meeting to discuss how to avoid the misuse of what they called “a few formal discrepancies.” The government then created a 30-man special police unit, baptized Majetek (Property), to block all property claims. This specialized police unit focused on aristocratic restitution investigations.

The Majetek asked the Czech intelligence services to collect evidence in Austrian and German archives against Prince Kinsky.

Czech police wire-tapped not only the Prince but also his lawyer. This

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wire-tapping was approved by a Czech court. The government even presented a falsified confiscation notification in the court. It later was revealed that the District National Committee, which had allegedly signed the notification in 1946, did not even exist in that year because the district was only created in 1949.

In the meantime, the Czech parliament passed the so-called “Kinsky law,” which enabled the state to interfere in on-going court proceedings with restitution plaintiffs and anyone who dared to request property restitution

Ljubo Sirc, CBE (b. 1920), British-Slovene economist and dissident. Photograph courtesy of Mladina (2005).

from towns. Such towns, in fact, obtained qualified legal aid paid for with public funds—and to which plaintiffs did not have a right to.

In order to avoid giving back stolen property, the state did not hesitate to manipulate and undermine its own legal order. The government interfered in court proceedings, it falsified documents, it controlled and observed plaintiffs and lawyers with methods which are in open contradiction to the rule of law. None of this seems to have bothered the European institutions which cover up these crimes with a veil of silence.

The Czech Republic is not an exception; there are thousands of similar cases in post-Communist countries. Slovenia offers another example. It was formerly part of

Yugoslavia. Tito’s Communism is still considered as benign and moderate, although the reign of terror in Yugoslavia, relative to its population, hardly differed from Stalin’s Great Terror. According to various assessments, between 200,000 and 300,000 Yugoslavs were murdered in 1945/46. And between 1945 and 1950, at least one million people were caught up in the wheels of the Communist judiciary and the secret police—that is one out of every ten inhabitants.

The West rewarded Tito’s break with Stalin at the beginning of the Cold War by overlooking his crimes. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her regular newspaper column, praised “the dictatorship of the proletariat interwoven with humanism” as Yugoslavia’s only hope. Tito was successful, she explained to her readers, because he told “the people the truth from the beginning.”

The real truth was different.

In 1947, Ljubo Sirc, now 93, was sentenced to death at a show trial in Ljubljana because of his wellknown anti-Communist positions and his contact with British diplomats. The secret police arrested him on the eve of Tito’s birthday, as he made his way home.

In prison, Sirc was interrogated

by Colonel Mitja Ribičič, the chief of Section 2 of OZNA, the Communist secret service, which was responsible for persecution of the “internal enemy.” Ribičič was in charge of summary executions of actual and potential enemies of the regime (he later became Yugoslav Prime Minister and President of the Central Committee of the League of Yugoslav Communists). Ribičič and his men interrogated Sirc into the early hours of the morning, and for four weeks, he was dragged from his cell each night for interrogation and was not allowed to sleep during the day.

Ljubo Sirc’s father Franjo, who had no connection with the antiCommunist opposition, was also sentenced to ten years imprisonment with hard labor because his son was an “enemy of the people” and he himself a “class enemy.” Franjo Sirc

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had been a successful entrepreneur until the Nazis confiscated his property, dismantled his textile factory machines, and destroyed the buildings. What was left by the Nazis was confiscated by the Communists after his arrest. He died after four years in prison.

Ljubo Sirc remained in prison for seven and a half years. In 1955 he succesfully escaped over the mountains to Italy. He later taught economics in Dacca, in Dundee, and in Glasgow, and founded the Centre for Research into PostCommunist Economies in London (CRCE). He wrote several books on the failure of central planning and a biography, Between Hitler and Tito, which is among the best and most vivid descriptions of life in former Yugoslavia.

Sirc has tried to recover his property for over twenty years.

After the show trial sentence was rescinded in 1991, he immediately applied for restitution and compensation for unjust imprisonment. He did recover a few scattered pieces of his family’s property, consisting of a house in Kranj (except the business premises on the ground floor), part of the garden and 600 out of 15,000 square meters of land belonging to his father’s textile factory. In 1990, the Slovene Parliament agreed to return all confiscated properties, but restitution was dragged out and came to a complete halt. Sirc had to appeal adverse decisions three times. Eventually, the government of Slovenia was fined a mere €18,000 by the ECHR for dilatory handling of the claims—which represented properties whose value amounted to nearly €10 million.

In 1998, Slovenia’s leftist parties, which had regained power, retroactively modified the property restitution law of 1991 to the detriment of the claimants.

The rationale given was that fiscal exigencies of the social state were more important than the right to property. In rejecting the discrimination complaint made

by Sirc in response to the new law, the Constitutional Court of

Slovenia argued that public interest justified the retroactive application of the law. Over 40% of property in Slovenia is still owned by the government. All nine judges in Slovenia’s Constitutional Court were appointed by the former President, Milan Kučan, who had also been leader of the Communist Party of Slovenia. Of the nine, eight are known Communists, including Ciril Ribičič, the son of the Communist butcher Mitja Ribičič. (“Ciril” was his father’s partisan name.)

Sirc’s case was supposed to be a test case, but the ECHR took eight years to reach a judgment.

In comments to a left-leaning newspaper, Boštjan Zupančič, the Slovene judge in Strasbourg, criticized “the gap between Western and Eastern thinking by which the European Court of Human Rights is characterized by a bourgeois mentality” and ranted against “yuppie legislation.” Instead of feeling bound by “legal formalism,” the judges should, according to Zupančič, exercise their legal power.

Ljubo Sirc drew the attention of Luzius Wildhaber, the president of the ECHR until 2007, to Zupančič’s peculiar understanding of the law.

Yet Wildhaber refused to recognize in the Slovene judge’s views any infringement of the requisite unité de doctrine on the Strasbourg court.

Sirc has since publicly accused the Slovene Constitutional Court and the section of the ECHR chaired by Zupančič of bias. What is involved, says Sirc, is the total disregard of his right to a fair and public hearing by an impartial and independent court— and, therefore, of the disregard of his human rights, in particular of his right to own property. But one has the feeling that he is screaming at a wall. And, in the meantime, Sirc has no more legal options to recover his family’s property.

Mr. Schwarz is a senior political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This article is based on a lecture originally given at the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey.

The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Laissez Faire Books, 2012): In this collection of essays, which range from academic essays to interviews and speeches, Hoppe displays his characteristic radically independent spirit, exploring everything from the nature of power, to the origins of private property, and the manipulation of money. Inspired by Frederic Bastiat, the 19th-century economist (who wrote: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”), Hoppe argues that instead of protecting the interests of citizens, the state usurps their power. He offers a radical vision of liberty and argues for a robust protection of private property, which he considers the basis of civilization. Hoppe is one of the leading exponents of the anarcho-libertarian tradition and organizes an annual conference under the auspices of the Property and Freedom Society.

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The Sources of Extremism João Carlos Espada

Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography by Corrado Vivanti (Princeton UP, 2013): This is an authoritative introduction to the life and work of the Florentine statesman and philosopher.

Written by one of Italy’s most respected scholars and originally published in Italian in 2008, this biography explores the connections between Machiavelli’s political ideas, the philosophical milieu and political world in which he lived, and his changing personal fortunes.

Vivanti also considers his republicanism and his evolving ideas about religion, examining his principal works—The Prince, The Discourses, The Florentine Histories, and The Art of War (as well as letters and poetry). The book is divided into three main sections, focusing on Machiavelli’s political career, his later exile, and his final years. Vivanti, who died last year, taught history at universities in Rome, Turin, and Perugia, and was the editor of the standard edition of the complete works of Machiavelli.

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Europe is experiencing a strange, somewhat paradoxical, phenomenon.

On the one hand, the European Union has been so successful that even countries whose European background is disputable want to join. The EU, moreover, has been a force for democracy, playing a crucial role in stabilizing new democracies, promoting free and peaceful cooperation among old European nation-states, and upholding laws, practices, and institutions that serve as noble examples of how to embrace democracy and the open society.

On the other hand, a growing sense of unease seems to be spreading throughout several EU member states. Parties that are well out of the mainstream and indeed even flatly extremist are now drawing significant voter support. In most cases, these parties promote aggressive nationalism, sometimes using the rhetoric of the radical left, sometimes that of the radical right. The language of national rivalry and class struggleor of national rivalry as class struggleis making its way back into public discourse. A “North-South divide” seems to be emerging within the eurozone as Southerners complain about “rich and greedy” Northerners, and Northerners rue their connections to “lazy and profligate” Southerners.

Conventional wisdom says that the main source of all this is the austerity measures that most governments have promoted (or acquiesced to) in order to deal with the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to this view, the key to taming voter fury and allaying the dangerous passions of national and class antagonism is to devise public policies that restore economic growth. The relationship between austerity and growth clearly has something to do with Europe’s predicament, but it hardly adds up to a comprehensive or fundamental explanation of what is going on— and what truly is at the root of extremism’s rise within the EU.

A simple observation will show why we should avoid mistaking the conflict between austerity and growth as the main source of resurgent extremism. In liberal democracies, rival views and proposals regarding public policy are the usual fare of parliamentary debate and party politics. “Keynes versus Hayek”—or the dispute regarding expansionary versus restrictive fiscal policies— is a key area of contention and defines much of the difference between center-left and center-right parties. The recent predominance of austerity-leaning governments in Europe cannot fully explain the rise of extremism. In the normal give-andtake of liberal-democratic political life, the reaction to “Hayek in the driver’s seat” should have been more support for Keynesian center-left parties as better guides to restoring growth. But like the dog that failed to bark in the night, this is not what has happened.

Instead, extremist parties of both right and left have reaped electoral windfalls.

Why are extremists prospering?

To begin answering this question, we must first separate the substantive “austerity versus growth” debate from a different question about the formal, or procedural, factors that have allowed extremist parties to exploit it.

In other words, we need to discover the non-substantive factors that will tell us why the substantive dispute between austerity and growth has put so much wind into the sails of some of Europe’s most extreme parties.

Clearly, “something” has prevented the mainstream parties from giving voice to anti-austerity feelings among voters-who then tend to fill this gap by taking to the streets and voting for extremist parties. What is that “something”? I submit that it is the euro itself. The common currency—or rather, a particular understanding of what it is and what it means—has led the mainstream parties of Europe to tie their own hands and willingly don straitjackets.

The phenomenon is particularly evident in Greece, and perhaps Italy

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will follow suit. In both countries, technocratic governments were appointed with the mission of restoring fiscal discipline as a condition for remaining in the euro-zone.

Elections eventually took place in Greece and the results were appalling.

A previously almost unknown farleft coalition called Syriza became Parliament’s second-largest, big enough to prevent mainstream centerleft and center-right parties from forming a working majority. A second election finally allowed the centerright New Democracy party to lead a coalition government, but Syriza still managed to come in second.

Defending the Euro—Badly The Greek experience reveals what went wrong in the whole process of defending and preserving the euro in its present format. When the unelected government was appointed in Athens, it was presented as an inevitable solution to save the euro.

A similar argument was made in Italy and resonated throughout Europe.

Remaining in the euro, furthermore, was treated as a kind of fate beyond democratic dispute—the euro treaty itself has no exit clause. An even more basic mistake was to claim that the exit of even a single country from the euro-zone would leave it hopelessly undermined. A further and similar mistake has been the introduction of a balanced-budget clause into the fiscal pact that 25 of the EU’s 27 member states have signed.

All these measures sent the same message: The euro was beyond dispute, demanded balanced budgets, and decisively removed crucial national questions—such as what currency to use or how to design fiscal policy—from the hands of national parliaments and mainstream parties.

Extremist parties responded by saying that the euro, the austerity policies, and the mainstream parties were simply instruments of a privileged capitalist oligarchy acting through Berlin and Brussels. The upshot has been an alarming resurgence of talk about class and national struggle in the continent that gave the world communism, fascism, and two world wars. One cannot help but recall

the warning sounded by the French philosopher and historian Elie Halévy (1870-1937) in his eloquent 1929 Rhodes Lecture at Oxford, when he spoke of the mutual contribution that revolutionary politics and nationalist politics had made to bringing about l’ère des tyrannies.

From this procedural or parliamentary viewpoint, the election in France of Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande may prove a blessing in disguise.

Hollande’s policies are substantively unrealistic, but his election may have the procedural or formal advantage

Élie Halévy (1870-1937), French philosopher, historian, and author of the book of essays, L’Ère des Tyrannies (1938). Photograph courtesy of the Henriette Guy-Loë Collection.

of bringing back into mainstream politics the substantive debate between austerity and growth.

Having said this, I now would like to deal with this substantive question and, somewhat paradoxically, argue that the so-called growth policies in Europe may well create more problems than they solve. But this will be a substantive argument and, I repeat, the crucial point from a procedural or parliamentary point of view is that the triumph of austerity cannot be taken as a given—the “growth first” side of the debate must be heard, and voters and parliaments must be able to choose it if they wish.

Facing this discussion, though, one cannot ignore the arguments that Germany offers. It can hardly

be denied that only sustainable growth is desirable. This means that growth-friendly policies should mainly be based simultaneously on fiscal discipline and structural reform aiming at the completion of the single market and the abolition of barriers to newcomers in national protected sectors. This should include, incidentally, cutting taxes, which is not being mentioned by Germany.

On the whole, though, the German argument seems plausible and responsible. Furthermore, it seems to address structural problems that could spell the decline of Europe in global affairs.

The only real short-term alternative to the above policies would be the creation of a true fiscal union. In other words, the only viable way of applying François Hollande’s policies of stimulus spending within the euro-zone is to create a full fiscal union: Southern countries have no money to spend and cannot borrow any at reasonable rates.

But a fiscal union can mean two different things. To Germany, it means enforcing fiscal discipline throughout the euro-zone. To others, especially in Southern Europe, it means creating automatic transfers from richer to poorer member states.

Perhaps German elites will accept the idea that in order to save the euro in its present form, Germany will have to pay. But will German voters follow suit? If a fiscal union complete with automatic transfers comes about, will Germany too experience an extremist upsurge, possibly of a rightist kind?

Will German voters swallow austerity or other unappetizing policies in order to subsidize Southern countries? Will mainstream German parties, once they have embraced a fiscal union, remain free to press for expansionary policies meant to favor growth?

The question may never even reach the voters. German elites fear above all a fiscal union in which automatic transfers would subsidize profligate Southern countries with German taxpayers’ money. The elites worry, and rightly so, that the inflation such policies would bring could well pave the way for extremism’s rise in Germany.

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The mismatch between German (or, more generally, Northern) concerns and Southern expectations reminds us that the EU cannot and should not be easily compared to the United States. In Federalist 2, John Jay observed several features making for unity among the Americans of 1787 that remain absent from the European experience. The thirteen colonies-turned-states, he wrote, could boast “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.”

This is not exactly the case with Europe, especially if one adds Jay’s next reflection on America: “As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign states.”

We should recall these words as we ponder current circumstances in Europe and the euro-zone. When the euro was made part of the Maastricht Treaty back in 1992, the new unified currency was supposed to promote economic convergence among the member states as well as closer political union and understanding. Instead, the opposite has occurred: There is now more economic divergence among euro-zone countries, and the language of national rivalry has re-entered political discourse.

What Lessons?

Though it may displease those who like simple answers, I do not think that German politicians and austerity policies are the cause of our present Euro-discontents. The Germans, in the main, have acted responsibly within the framework that they are using. More or less the same can be said of François Hollande, even if I have less sympathy for his rhetoric.

But the point is that both the German Christian Democrats and the French

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Socialists have been trying to do what responsible democratic parties ought to do: Listen to voters and try to voice their concerns. Political rivalry is inherent in liberal democracy, and the democratic arena’s most decisive space is parliament.

What, then, is the origin of Europe’s present predicament? There is, as I have suggested, the straitjacket that the euro project jams onto European bodies politic. But this only tells part of the story. Yes, the euro does impose common requirements that take no account of local economic conditions. And yes, absent

John Jay (1745–1829) was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers (1787/1788), along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Jay served as the first Chief Justice of the US. Detail of an oil portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1794.

the euro the countries of Southern Europe would probably have long since resorted to currency devaluation in order to regain at least a semblance of competitiveness. Political cont1ict would have remained a largely national affair, free of complaints about Berlin, Brussels, “rich, bossy Northerners,” or “idle, spendthrift Southerners.”

But if it is true that the euro has promoted both supranational integration and national rivalries, it is no less true that the euro has been a democratic undertaking, voluntarily adopted by national parliaments in the member states. It is also true that, for a significant portion of the democratic European elites, and possibly also of the middle and working classes, the euro has been perceived as a democratic, pan-

European, and peaceful aspiration. In most continental European countries, unlike in the British Isles, opposition to the euro has been mainly associated with movements of the far right and far left that oppose free trade, free markets, open societies, and liberaldemocratic citizenship. It would be a great mistake, then, to embark upon a political and intellectual critique of the euro as such, hoping that this alone could reinforce the cause of democracy in Europe.

But how can we reconcile the euro’s tendency to heat up national rivalries and boost extremist parties with the euro’s reasonable claim to embody a liberal-democratic aspiration that has strong appeal in several, and indeed perhaps most, Continental European countries?

To paraphrase James Madison in Federalist 10, the answer lies in finding a democratic remedy for the diseases most incident to democratic government. What is needed is a proper procedural framework that will allow the euro experiment to go forward by trial and error, as Karl Popper might have said. Only by conjectures and refutations, by an ongoing conversation between rival views and proposals-including the proposal to quit the Eurozone—can this experiment proceed. Europe needs, in a way, to “trivialize” the euro issue—to stop treating it as a matter of the highest constitutional pitch and moment, and to bring it down instead into the realm of normal political controversy and debate. In other words, Europe needs to end the misleading association between the euro's future and the future of democracy and the European Union.

This means that the euro agreement ought to have a clear exit clause, if only because a house with doors that open only from without is asking to have its walls knocked down from within. The euro, and indeed the whole European project, have been remarkable successes so far, but they have been and will be successful only on a voluntary basis. Countries that want out of the euro, or whose democratically elected governments wish to adopt policies that are incompatible with the euro, should

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be allowed to leave in a peaceful and orderly manner. European politicians and officials from the highest levels on down need to state this clearly. They should further and wholeheartedly declare that the common currency and the EU as a whole are emphatically not one and the same project, and that space must exist within the EU for different degrees of integration. This is already the case: Only 17 of the EU’s 27 member states belong to the euro-zone.

But this reality tends to be ignored, and the euro tends to be presented as an inevitable, compulsory requisite of the EU of the future.

Now we come to a fundamental question that flows from a pedestrian observation: Why have Europe’s democratic leaders failed to grasp the obvious point that the euro-zone should only be presented as a purely voluntary club complete with an escape hatch?

The answer lies not in some conspiracy theory about Euro-elites, but in the predominant political culture of the Continental European democracies. As a Continental European myself, I regret that these political cultures seem to lack the open-mindedness, easygoingness, and even “untidiness” (to borrow a phrase from Ralf Dahrendorf) that can be found in greater measure in the political cultures of what Winston Churchill liked to call “the Englishspeaking peoples.”

I realize that I am merely gesturing here at what would have to be a long and deep argument, one that would need to reckon with traditions and experiences that go back a long way and are much at variance one from another. I would have to chart and compare what Gertrude Himmelfarb calls “different roads to modernity.” But to simplify dramatically, I would say that, in Continental Europe, democratic elites tend to perceive democratic politics as a means to achieving a purpose. It usually is a noble purpose, to be sure, but it is still a purpose. It usually is related to modernization, or perhaps to the superseding of historically catastrophic rivalries between nation-states, if not of the nation-states themselves. Or it may be phrased as being about the enlightenment of European peoples, or, in the present circumstances, the creation of a single currency.

Among the English-speaking peoples, by contrast, democracy is less a means to an end than an ethos and a way of life. The only possible purpose of democracy among the English-speaking peoples could be said to be safeguarding the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence. This, however, is more a procedural than a substantive purpose. For this reason, among the English-speaking peoples, it just happens—it is just a fact of life— that democracy will sometimes go in one direction, while at other times it will head toward a different and maybe even opposite point of the compass.

No external substantive purpose, therefore, can be identified with democracy. Different, often opposing, purposes enter into the realm of democratic controversy and rivalry, the realm of parties, elections, legislatures, and vibrant civil societies. We need a bit more of this in Continental Europe.

“Trust the people,” Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill used to say. By this, they meant let people engage in a free, orderly, and peaceful conversation about how to govern themselves, a conversation whose main realm lies in an elected legislature. This is basically what democracy is about. It is most likely to lead, in a spontaneous and undersigned way, to variety, a certain degree of untidiness, and, most certainly, the ever-present possibility that one can win an argument one day and lose one the next. European democrats, therefore, should be more open to losing an argument about specific purposes—including the euro in its present, troubled form—if they really want to strengthen democracy in Europe.

Prof. Espada is director of the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal and holder of the European Parliament/Bronislaw Geremek European Civilization Chair at the College of Europe, Natolin, in Warsaw. This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the October 2012 edition of the Journal of Democracy. © 2012 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission.

A History of Political Ideas from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Philippe Nemo (Duquesne University Press, 2013): Originally published in French in 2012, this book examines the foundations of political thought in the West. In response to what he sees as the increasing compartmentalization of education, Nemo provides a unifying and overarching framework for political philosophy. Nemo explains that the beginnings of modern political thought can be traced to three primary sources: the philosophers and thinkers of the Greek city-state (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon), Rome (e.g. Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus), and the Christian tradition (e.g. Saints Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas). Nemo, a professor of philosophy and political thought at ESCP Europe in Paris, received the Koenigswarter Prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and the Grand Prix du Livre of the Association pour la Liberté Économique et le Progrès Social for this book. He is also the author of What is the West? and Histoire du libéralisme en Europe.

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Promoting Liberal Learning in the Netherlands Emma Cohen de Lara Over the last two decades, the Netherlands has seen a remarkable development in institutions of higher education. When I was eighteen years old and graduating from high school, I had to make up my mind about the degree that I was to pursue in academia. This turned out to be political science.

When I started my degree, I was immersed in courses on Dutch politics, American politics, international relations, etc. Nowadays, aspiring students in the Netherlands have a choice between pursuing a disciplinary degree and pursuing a degree at one of the six or seven newly founded liberal arts and sciences (LAS) colleges.

These colleges offer small classes, courses taught in English and a degree in a major—Social Sciences, Sciences or Humanities—which allows the student to build their own curriculum by selecting courses from a wide range of disciplines. A student majoring in the Social Sciences, for example, may now obtain his degree with several courses in political science, law and sociology, alongside a range of socalled prerequisite or ‘core courses’.

Institutions that offer such broad bachelor’s degree are new to the Netherlands. Their introduction was been facilitated by the so-called Bologna Process that started in 1999.

This was an attempt by European ministers of education to harmonize higher education across EU member states by introducing a shared system of credits called the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). They also introduced a dual system of undergraduate and graduate education: bachelor’s (BA) and master’s (MA) programs. This latter innovation, the BA/MA structure, created room for new institutions in, for example, the Netherlands to offer a bachelor’s degree only—and this proved to be a good fit with the overall model of a liberal arts and sciences education.

Alongside these institutional developments is the development of an entire new discourse about the

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idea of a liberal arts and sciences education—what its aims are, why it matters and how it works. However, it would be fair to say that the Dutch discourse on the liberal arts and sciences is still in its infancy. This is not surprising, given that liberal arts and sciences colleges are of a recent date, and given that many academics currently teaching at these colleges are trained in the traditional, disciplinary way.

The Dutch discourse revolves around talk about skills and ‘interdisciplinarity’. For example, students are meant to acquire academic writing skills and, more ambitiously, the problem-solving skills ‘necessary for success in the 21st century’, whatever that means. Moreover, students

Plato. Marble copy of a portrait made by Silanion (ca. 370 BC) for the Academy of Athens; currently located in the Musei Capitolini in Rome.

Image courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen.

are meant to complete their broad bachelor’s degree by passing a theme course in which one theme is studied from the perspective of different disciplines—hence, cultivating interdisciplinarity.

These approaches are certainly valuable, with the one caveat that they tend to define a liberal arts and sciences education in terms of formal instead of substantive aspects. Of course, students in an LAS setting need to be able to write academically and construct proper arguments, and it may certainly be helpful if a student learns to think across disciplinary boundaries. But what is the substantive

value of a liberal arts and sciences education? What is its core content?

And why is this important?

To a conservative, the institutional development of the liberal arts and sciences colleges is likely to invite reflection on a topic that is often dear to his heart— namely, the topic of a liberal education. And on this point, the liberal arts and sciences setting seems to offer the perfect opportunity for a liberal education, more so than in a research university.

Much has been written lately about liberal education and the idea of a university. Last year, for example, the UK’s Stefan Collini published What are Universities For? But much of the literature has come from the other side of the Atlantic (and not necessarily from conservatives).

Some recent examples include Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), Mark William Roche’s Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (2010) and Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007).

But in order to take a stab at the meaning of a liberal education from this side of the Atlantic, I would like to reflect on the following: One aspect that many scholars seem to agree on is that a liberal education has something to do with learning as an intrinsic— and not just as an instrumental—good.

Liberal education may be contrasted with a servile education or education that serves another, usually more immediately practical or professional, purpose.

A lawyer, for example, needs to know the law in order to serve his clients and earn a living. An economist needs to understand the fundamentals of trade or macroeconomics in order to serve public policy. This kind of education is legitimate in its own right.

And yet, those who advocate a truly liberal education argue that universities should also provide something that goes beyond the servile education in one of the professions.

This kind of education introduces students to questions about the good

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life—and these are questions that important part of our being. Those In the Republic, Socrates talks typically have no immediate purpose who care for their souls have a good about the soul in self-evident terms, beyond cultivating a reflective life, whereas those who neglect to care as a concept that needs no further disposition or a disposition that values for their soul live a life of misery. introduction. But for the modern learning for its own sake. But what Now, most modern students student, it is legitimate to wonder does it mean to say that learning is an who start out reading the Republic— about the questions that the Republic intrinsic, and not just instrumental, oftentimes as the very first book in raises, such as: What is the soul? What good? a course in philosophy or political does it mean to have a soul? And what In Plato’s Republic, Socrates thought—are not accustomed to think does Socrates mean by arguing that makes the helpful distinction between about the human soul in the terms that the best life for human beings crucially three kinds of goods or things we Socrates proposes. In fact, in their depends not on what we are or what value. First, there are those things biology courses, students are taught we do, but on who we are internally that we value for their own sake and that we are solely material beings who (or, in his words, on the condition of not for any of the consequences are determined by the need to survive our souls)? of having them. One may think of and/or the need to procreate. In their Students may still end up agreeing enjoying a beautiful sunset, for with the neuroscientist who example, or taking pleasure in argues that there is no soul the sight of children playing. and that justice is certainly not Other things we value both the result of any kind of moral for themselves and for their ordering in the soul. But at least consequences. Health is a these students in the process good example: Being healthy is will have broadened their minds enjoyable in and of itself, and it and will have thoughtfully enables us to work and earn a considered an alternative point living. A third category is made of view. They will have learned up of things that we value to reflect on ideas that are—to only for their consequences. them—not necessarily selfTaking medicine, for example, evident. is not pleasurable in its own A text such as Plato’s right, but we value it for its Republic and other so-called ‘core consequences—that is, getting texts’ confront students with rid of an illness. questions and ideas that expand The good of learning is their intellectual horizons. I likely to fall into the second think that this goes some way category. It is an activity that towards defining what is meant we value for its own sake and by a liberal education and why for its consequences. Now, it is important. it is quite easy to understand The queen of philosophy ruling over the Greek philosophers, Socrates It is not clear whether that learning may get us what and Plato, surrounded by the seven liberal arts, each represented by someone who has broadened we want. A diploma is likely to a woman dressed in a long-sleeved gown: Grammar, Rhetoric, and his mind will be a better lawyer get us a job, a (higher) salary, Dialectics (the trivium) and Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and or economist, but I think that a good reputation and perhaps Astronomy (the quadrivium). From the 12th century compendium, the chances are that he will be. even a good spouse. But the Hortus deliciarium (Garden of Delights), assembled by Herrad of The pay-off is not immediate, argument that learning is Landsberg at Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace. Courtesy of the University nor concrete. And yet human something to be valued for its life may be the better for it. of Wisconisn, Eau Claire. own sake, just like a beautiful More trust is necessary to leave sunset, may not be easy to see and neuroscience courses, they are taught teachers and students to their own may require further elaboration. that we are fundamentally a bundle of resources, to give them the freedom to So why is learning an inherently neurons firing away in our brain. explore the ideas, the arguments and valuable good? I would argue that the So thinking about the human the characters in the great philosophical answer to this question has something soul as an immaterial and, yet, as the and literary texts of the West. It is now to do with who we are as human most important part of our being has up to Dutch academics and Dutch beings—and with that which enables the potential to take students out of students to further develop their own us not merely to survive but to live a their modern ‘comfort zones’, pushing appreciation for liberal education. The good life. Take the following example: them, and forcing them to contemplate time for it is now.

In the Republic, Socrates defines the something new. Life without such core of our being in terms of the contemplation would be as barren as Dr. Cohen de Lara teaches political soul. He argues, indeed, that the soul life without beautiful sunsets and life thought at Amsterdam University College is an immaterial and, yet, the most without children playing. in the Netherlands.

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Conservatism & the Liberal Mind Nils August Andresen Conservatism is probably one of the most ambiguous political traditions. Self-styled conservative politicians today span anything from paleo-conservatives in the U.S. (Pat Buchanan), to politicians heavily influenced by a specific form of Christianity (Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin), to the Christian democratic tradition of continental Europe (Angela Merkel), to the liberal conservatives of Northwest Europe (Fredrik Reinfeldt).

Some conservatives can be for the welfare state, while others are against the welfare state; for gay marriage and against gay marriage; for the European Union and against the European Union; for change and for preservation.

This ambiguity, however, is not new, and does not necessarily indicate that some conservatives have lost their historical roots.

Rather, both ambiguity and tension have been part of the conservative movement since its inception as a formulated political philosophy in the wake of the French Revolution.

Two Forms of Conservatism One way of trying to make sense of the situation is to look at two conservative—but two very different—responses to the French revolution.

Most regard Edmund Burke (1729-1797) as one of the founders of conservatism as a political philosophy. At first glance, Burke’s standing within the conservative tradition might seem paradoxical.

Burke never used the term “conservatism”, which did not exist at the time; and throughout most of his life, he was considered to be of a liberal disposition. He was sympathetic to the cause of American revolutionaries; he was, for his time, liberal in religious matters—being, among other things, married to a Catholic in a society where Catholics did not yet enjoy full political rights. And at

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one point, Burke even raised the plight of homosexuals in the British Parliament, after an episode where two men sentenced to the gauntlet had been killed by a mob.

One of his main concerns was to preserve and expand the “ancient rights and liberties” of the British, which he saw as an evolving body of rights, some put into writing— like the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights of 1689—and some guarded by various British institutions and Common Law.

Portrait of Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre by Karl Vogel von Vogelstein (1810).

When Burke’s thought came to be seen as a starting point for political conservatism, it was because of his reaction to the French Revolution.

His prediction, which mostly turned out to be accurate, was that attempts to create liberty by tearing down all existing structures and institution, and by creating abstract rights not grounded in precedent, institutions and the lives of the people, would lead not only to chaos, but to violence and oppression.

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790, three years before Robespierre’s Reign of Terror commenced. However, his opposition to the French Revolution did not imply opposition to change in and of itself. Burke’s opposition

to the changes in France had to do with the nature of the changes, and the manner in which they occurred.

The revolutionaries discarded existing institutions and notions of political authority and legitimacy, existing moral norms and social relations, offering in their place theoretically derived structures, which could not and did not bind men to order and morality, because they were not grounded in them through experience.

But Burke simultaneously recognised the need for political and social change in response to the unfolding events of history.

In his Reflections, he wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”. And this is why “change to preserve” has been an important slogan for the Norwegian Conservative party—for whom the task has been to understand which fundamental values should be preserved, and when it is necessary to change in order to preserve them.

Burke wrote his magnum opus early on during the French Revolution. He wrote not from Paris but from London, which enjoyed a much more liberal politics than the France of the ancien régime. Burke did not want to go back in time; his was a warning to the French, but also to his fellow countrymen, about how one should proceed in order to progress. He sought a way forward where society progressed according to its own logic, a society which allowed its members to develop ‘organically’.

But in France itself, the revolution produced a different kind of conservative response.

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was a philosopher of French ancestry from Chambéry, which was then part of the independent Kingdom of Savoy. He was involved in French politics, and an ardent opponent of republicanism. When Chambéry was conquered by French revolutionary forces in 1792, de Maistre fled, living variously in Lausanne, Venice,

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Cagliari and St. Petersburg, where he served as Savoy’s ambassador.

He finally settled in Turin where he died in 1821.

De Maistre wished to restore the time before the revolution; he wanted the House of Bourbon back on the throne; and he wanted greater powers for the pope. The French literary critic Émile Faguet later described de Maistre as a proponent of a monstrous trinity of pope, king, and hangman.

Both Burke and de Maistre railed against the French Revolution.

But the reasons for their outrage were different and the point of view from which they observed differed.

These differences go some way to shed light on the different currents in today’s conservatism.

Burke’s point of view was the liberal England where revolution never happened, a society that he felt was fundamentally on the ‘right track’. De Maistre’s point of view was from France after the revolution, after the fall of what he saw as his civilization, and he wanted to go back; he wanted to restore this civilization with, if necessary, all the force needed. De Maistre was not concerned with the idea of “change in order to preserve.” Rather, having seen the destructive effects of the Reign of Terror, he railed not only against the calamities of revolution but against large swaths of early modern history: He not only blamed revolutionaries, republicanism and rationalism for the fall of France but also everything that questioned existing authority. In his view, the original sin, if you will, was the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the absolute authority of the pope. “Christianity can only be defended by Catholic principle,” he wrote in Réflexions sur la Protestantisme, “which brings everything back to authority.”

When to Change?

These different approaches lead to a pronounced difference in the view of the state: For Burke, the state needed to be careful in its choice of instruments, because intrusive state action always risks disturbing

the actual lives that people live and because, in a sense, to continue to live those lives without unnecessary and disruptive interference is a part of their “ancient rights and liberties.”

De Maistre, on the other hand, is in one sense himself a revolutionary: Dramatic action can be necessary to bring society back to its pre-fallen state.

My conservatism, which has been the predominant one in the Norwegian conservative tradition, is a Burkean conservatism. It is a privileged conservatism: It presupposes that society is fundamentally good or, at least, that there is something good on which to build. One who sees society as mostly rotten will hardly see it as his task to guard “ancient rights and liberties.” This privilege is partly a function of objective history (how good is your society?) but also of subjective history (do you have the ability to find some order of human relations to appreciate at least some aspects of your own predicament?).

The question for Burke’s conservatism, then, is: When is it necessary to change in order to preserve that which is fundamentally a good society? What is it that should be preserved? And what is the source of the need for change?

One can liken a conservative statesman in this tradition with a gardener: He waters the flowers, he trims the hedge, he tills the soil.

Maybe he plants some new flowers each year. From time to time he weeds the flower beds. But the garden also changes due to factors completely out of his control: Weather and climate vary, and there is change. For some plants, it might suddenly get too cold, for others, too cold, too wet or too dry.

The ‘conservative gardener’ cannot frantically try to preserve everything that existed before the conditions change and he cannot treat all the new flowers that the world brings as mere weeds.

Our societies are such gardens, where most of the changes that happen, do not originate in the offices of government: Free people, organisations and institutions bring

into it new ideas, new technology and new values; and the conservative statesman must approach those changes in the same way as the gardener approaches his everchanging garden.

New ‘plants’ in our society can often not be kept out without resorting to illiberal means. My conservatism will always strive to avoid such means because the most important thing that we want to preserve is our ancient rights and liberties; what is to be preserved is a society that grows and develops, from the bottom up, not from the top down. And this cannot be secured through coercive means.

I shall give one example of this kind of conservatism: I often hear that you cannot be conservative and, at the same time, accept or support a multicultural society. However, this is a societal changes which has originated not in government policies but as a result of new ideas, new technologies and new values in society.

Conservatism & Multiculturalism One of the aspects of Western society that has changed drastically over the last generation has to do with immigration. Over the last several decades, more than half a million people, about 10% of the population, has moved to Norway.

Immigration has thus become one of the big public policy issues of our time, not least for Norwegian conservatives.

As with changes that have led to ongoing debates about gay marriage, the multicultural challenges that we face have not been caused by pro-active government policies: Increasing migration has been caused by globalisation, decolonisation and new technologies which have made transportation more readily available, and which have revolutionised communication and information flows across borders. In the case of Norway, the oil-based economy that has transformed the country and which has made it one of the richest countries in the world, has provided an extra allure to migrants.

High migration thus presents

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several dilemmas for Norwegian conservatives: A more liberal immigration policy implies higher immigration and, as a result, any relating changes it leads to will happen quicker and might be more disruptive. All these changes need not be negative; but some of them might be. And changes that are too quick and too comprehensive present a challenge to the conservative idea of a society that develops organically.

On the other hand, we cannot easily curtail immigration drastically without making other fundamental changes in our societies—in how we think about political asylum, the value of being able to move across borders and the obligation to honor international agreements.

Such changes in the way we think about such matters are something conservatives should be concerned about.

Finding the right balance between these two kinds of concerns is the natural middle ground for conservatives on the immigration question. At the same time, an important challenge is to find other means to preserve society’s most important values—those that might be threatened by immigration, be it by an influx of immigrants who hold other values or by some of the neonativist reactions to immigration that might similarly challenge our core ideals (rule of law, tolerance and moderation).

To think about returning to a society without any multicultural presence has more to do with de Maistre’s reactionary dream about France before the revolution, than with Burke’s idea of building on the best of what you have and making the best of the challenges that each generation confronts.

Conservatism & the Liberal Mind The conservatism I have described briefly above—my conservatism—is a liberal conservatism.

A question that some might ask in response is: What distinguishes such a conservatism from (classical) liberalism?

One way of approaching this

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question is to look at the different presuppositions about man that conservatism and liberalism take as their point of departure. To simplify: A liberal believes that everyone should be able to follow his desires (as long as they do not conflict with the rights of others) because he or she knows best (as opposed to socialists who more often engage in social engineering, believing that the government knows best). A conservative, on the other hand, believes that man knows very little.

A basic tenet of the conservative

Portrait of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) painted by James Northcote in 1790.

view of man—something which unites Burke and de Maistre—is that man is fallible, a view that has been inspired by the Christian view that man is indeed fallen. In other words, not only do we possess very limited cognitive abilities, we are also torn by destructive desires: lust and greed, pride and vengefulness.

As a conservative, my wariness of coercive state power or legislation is not based on the belief that individuals are rational and should be left alone, or that any state intervention, regulation or prohibition is in itself illegitimate; rather, it is based on the fact that I am afraid that government itself suffers from precisely the same vices as the rest of us.

At this point, however, there are subtle differences between the Burkean view and the view of

conservatives who are more inclined to support state authority. Most conservatives would agree that a fallible government should seek to avoid initiating radical change with unforeseeable effects for the lives of its citizens.

A classic disagreement between liberals and conservatives in Norway is in the view of the constitutional monarchy. To the conservative, all democratic systems have elements that do not directly reflect the will of the people at any given moment—a constitution, which is hard to change, or a supreme court, which can overturn legislation.

Such institutions are not entirely unproblematic precisely because they might challenge a democratic majority (a cursory glance at US politics over the last decade should suffice to prove the point), with endless controversies both over the supreme court’s role and over the constitution. But they are essential in preserving Western democracy.

In order to work, in spite of the latent conflict with the current will of the people, such institutions depend on being seen as legitimate.

Being seen as legitimate is, however, a practical not theoretical exercise.

It takes time to garner legitimacy; it is easy to lose it. The Norwegian monarchy enjoys such legitimacy and contributes a continuity to the state’s existence that might even be more important as society changes quickly, whether we like it or not.

Of course, such an argument requires a specific historical condition. It is not valid for any country or at any time. Indeed, if the monarchy loses its standing in Norway, the conservative argument for it will weaken over time. But to willfully weaken an institution that works—that enjoys legitimacy, that has a place in the life and the history of the nation—is not a task for a conservative statesman.

However, for the same reason that government should be wary of initiating drastic change, it should, in my view, be wary of using drastic means to stop organic change, which grows from below. In these cases, my conception of conservatism can,

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in its outcomes, resemble liberalism, but the reasoning will differ.

Lastly, there is also some genealogical relationship between liberalism and Burkean conservatism.

Burke was a strong opponent of French liberalism and French rationalism; but he was opposed neither to reason nor to liberal values. Rather, he stood in the tradition of British empiricism and the liberal political ideas of John Locke, embodied in the English Bill of Rights. That same tradition has also infused at least parts of modern liberalism, through thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.

In my view, in order to succeed in modern society, conservatism needs to think carefully about the difference between, on the one hand, changes that originate from below, driven by new technology, new knowledge and historical processes that play themselves out in the private lives of citizens, and, on the other hand, changes that are instigated by government.

Conservatism also needs to reflect on when it is possible to try to affect changing values or practices in society with legitimate means and legitimate goals, and when it is necessary to change other policies to preserve more fundamental values.

Finally, a modern conservatism needs to reconcile itself with the fact that conservatives will have different opinions on many issues. At least some of these differences derive not from dogma but from practical judgment—and practical judgment depends on personal experience.

If conservatives recognize this, then perhaps many of the contentious debates between conservatives about the important issues of our day might improve considerably—and, hopefully, might build a basis for better meeting the challenges that we face today.

Mr. Andresen is editor of the Norwegian conservative journal, Minerva. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oslo, Norway. This article was translated, abridged, and adapted from an essay in the book, Ny Vind Over Norge (New Wind Over Norway), published in 2013.

A Few Rejoinders from the Author ...

How liberal was Burke, really?

Edmund Burke has always been accused of being inconsistent.

Sometimes, this accusation is not without merit. However, his reply to this was that in striving for the right balance, he put his efforts on the side that needed to be strengthened.

True, in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, as Britain is at war with France, we see a more reactionary side of Burke when he speaks about the French context. However, his main concern throughout his work is with the development of British society and here, we seldom see the reactionary Burke but rather one who seeks gradual development, based on ancient rights and liberties, and with a particular emphasis on the principles laid down in the English Bill of Rights.

How organic was the development of Norway’s multicultural society?

As I write in my essay, immigration can—and should—be affected by policies. My point was that the reason for increased immigration was not a policy change, but rather a change in the world around us. It could well be argued that in order to preserve Norwegian society, policies should have changed. However, as I argue, drastic policy changes would imply that other aspects of society would change.

A blanket ban on granting asylum or accepting refugees would, in my view, imply a farewell to other important values that we consider part and parcel of our society. This view does not imply that we should not strive to find policies that might reduce the rate of immigration; I believe that we should. But it implies that radical policy changes also embody risks to society. And the fact that society changes gradually, as a consequence of immigration, should not in itself spur panic among conservatives.

The challenge, when aspects of society other than policies change, is often to strike a balance between policy change designed mitigate or prevent these changes, policy change designed to accommodate the changes, and accepting the limits of (moderate) policies to fully control such change.

In your article, you speak repeatedly of “historical forces” that need to be accommodated.

But have we learned nothing from Communism?

The comparison between actual developments in the world and the Marxist view of inevitable historical forces is misguided. The Marxist view was not that politicians should take account of the myriad of actual changes in a multifaceted society, but an ideological, almost metaphysical, view that specific, predefined historical forces dictate a specific policy, namely revolution.

To postulate the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat based on grand suppositions about a transition from feudalism to capitalism is quite different from asking the question of how the effect of policies change when the actual fact of more women desiring to pursue a career becomes apparent; or—in line with the view reflected in the previous question, and in my answer to it—asking whether new restrictions on immigration might be necessary in light of increased global migration.

I do not accept that my vision of conservatism has nothing of its own to bring into the world. Rather, it builds on a set of values that were central to Burke, central to the fathers of the Norwegian constitution, and developed through experience since.

At the heart of these values stand what Burke would call “our ancient rights and liberties.” Many of these rights and liberties are now, at least superficially, so widely cherished that we forget to claim them as part of the Burkean, or the Norwegian conservative, tradition.

However, in addition to these values, the Burkean tradition takes as its point of departure a view of the human, grounded in Christianity, which sees man as fallen and fallible; knowledge as imperfect and limited; and humility when facing another human being, history, or tradition.

This view lends its own kind of support to the ancient rights and liberties, but it also leads us towards an understanding of the limits of we should seek to achieve through political action.

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The Expansion of Euthanasia in Europe Wesley J. Smith The forty-five-year-old twin brothers had not contracted a terminal illness. Nor were Marc and Eddy Verbessem in physical pain. Both had been born deaf and were progressively losing their eyesight. As the Telegraph reported, “The pair told doctors that they were unable to bear the thought of not being able to see each other again,” and so wanted to die.

When their own doctor wouldn’t kill them, they found their executioner in Dr. David Dufour, who told a television newscast: “They had a cup of coffee in the hall, it went well and [they had] a rich conversation.

Then the separation from their parents and brother was very serene and beautiful. At the last there was a little wave of their hands and then they were gone.”

In a morally sane society, Dufour would lose his license to practice medicine and be tried for homicide. But having legalized euthanasia, Belgium no longer fits that description. The twins were not the first joint euthanasia killings reported in the country.

In 2011, Belgian media extolled the joint deaths of an elderly couple, who were lethally injected with the apparent knowledge and support of their local community. They even made their final arrangements at the local mortuary before submitting to their terminations.

The couple’s demise was celebrated by a Belgian bioethicist, who said, “It is an important signal to break a taboo.” He added in terms as calm and chilling as those of the doctor who killed the twins, “This can be viewed as a normal way of dying and viewed as such by the community at large. … Non-terminal partners, as we call them, also have the option of dying together. It is legally possible. … And this is a

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beautiful example that allows us to provide a dignified death to this couple, thanks to euthanasia.”

Most societies see joint suicides by elderly couples as tragic. For some in Belgium, they are beautiful.

The news gets much worse in Belgium. Currently, the government is agitating to allow minors to consent to euthanasia if, as the ruling Socialist party leader Thierry Giet advocates, the child is “capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate.” Alzheimer’s patients will also soon be allowed to consent to euthanasia.

And that isn’t the worst of it. As early as 1993 I worried that if assisted suicide were ever normalized, one day “organ harvesting” could be added to euthanasia “as a plum to society.”

In Belgium it now has.

The joining of voluntary euthanasia and organ harvesting came to light in a 2008 letter published in the medical journal Transplant International, reporting that a totally paralyzed woman first asked for euthanasia— permission granted—and then asked to donate her organs after her heart stopped. These procedures were deemed ethical simply because they had been performed. “This case of two separate requests . . . demonstrates that organ harvesting after euthanasia may be considered and accepted from ethical, legal, and practical viewpoints” in countries where euthanasia is legal, doctors claim in the letter. Moreover, “this possibility may increase the number of transplantable organs and may also provide some comfort to the donor and his (her) family.”

Since this first case, other killings followed by organ harvesting have been reported— including at least one case involving a patient with a severe mental illness. As reported in Applied

Cardiopulmonary Pathophysiology in 2011, four patients (three disabled and one mentally ill) were euthanized and their lungs harvested. The authors seem to hope for more opportunities to study the efficiency and efficacy of harvesting organs from euthanized patients. “Euthanasia donors accounted for 2.8% of all donors and 23.5% of all DCD [donors after cardiac death].” they noted in their conclusion.

Physicians in favor of post-euthanasia organ harvesting have become so emboldened by the seeming acceptance of their agenda that they hold symposia proselytizing for the program to be expanded wherever euthanasia is legal. These symposia specifically target patients with neuromuscular disabilities as best suited to the joint procedure since, unlike cancer patients, they provide “good organs” when they die.

By joining euthanasia with organ donation, Belgium crossed a very dangerous bridge: The country gave society the chance to benefit from mercy killing. But the acceptance of joint killing and harvesting sends a cruel message to disabled and mentally ill people that their deaths could have greater value than their lives.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia was decriminalized in certain cases after a 1973 court ruling that a doctor who followed protective guidelines would not be prosecuted. The doctor could euthanize his patient only if unbearable suffering could be alleviated in no other way, the patient had made repeated requests for euthanasia, a second doctor had confirmed the opinion of the first, and the doctor reported the euthanasia to the coroner.

This system continued until 2002, when lethally injecting or assisting the suicides of qualified patients was formally legalized.

From its supposedly restricted and limited beginnings, since

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1973 the practice of physicianadministered death to those who ask for it has steadily expanded— from the terminally ill, to more seriously chronically ill, to people with serious disabilities, to those suffering from existential anguish, mental illness, or profound depression.

Abuses of the system have been repeatedly reported, with the offenders facing few or no legal or professional consequences when they violate legal guidelines.

For example, doctors sometimes euthanize patients who have not asked to die, a practice known as “termination without request or consent.” Such cases are rarely prosecuted or meaningfully punished, with a few weeks’ suspended sentence a typical sanction in the rare convictions.

Similarly, although infanticide remains against the law in the Netherlands, and euthanizing babies is technically murder, infanticide is a regular practice in some Dutch hospitals. The Lancet twice reported that about 8 percent of all infants who die in the Netherlands each year— perhaps eighty to ninety cases— are euthanized. Another study found a similar infanticide rate in Flanders, Belgium.

As in cases of non-voluntary euthanasia, few doctors are prosecuted for euthanizing babies, and, as far as I know, none of those convicted has ever faced professional discipline or anything more than a brief suspended sentence. In fact, infanticide became so acceptable that in 2004, a bureaucratic checklist was designed to help doctors determine which terminally ill or severely disabled infants could be euthanized ethically. “The Groningen Protocol”, as it is known, was ratified in 2005 by the Dutch National Association of Pediatricians.

But these facts are old news.

More recent events demonstrate that the practice of euthanasia has grown ever more radical.

For example, euthanasia inflicted

upon the mentally ill has recently become far more common. A 2012 Dutch News story reported that thirteen patients with mental illness had been euthanized in 2011, along with forty-nine patients with early dementia.

Dutch euthanasia authorities explicitly approve such cases through oversight boards called regional committees that review and discuss cases of euthanasia that test the boundaries. For example, the euthanasia death of a woman hospitalized for severe depression was specifically approved in the Regional Committees Annual Report of 2010. She had suffered intermittently from depression since 1980, and since 2005 she had spent most of her time in the hospital. When a final round of treatment failed, the committee held that her mental suffering constituted suitable grounds to be killed. Though she was lucid, she used a wheelchair, had a poor appetite, and slept badly.

The committee report said that “her thinking was not abnormal, nor did she have serious cognitive problems” and that “her mood was depressive, but not psychotic.” The patient “was emotionally unstable, crying all the time and constantly talking about how miserable she felt and how empty, hopeless and unbearable her life was. . . . She stated that she could no longer cope with reality, since she no longer felt part of it.” Since her suffering “was unbearable, with no prospect of improvement,” the committee decided that the doctor “had acted in accordance with the statutory due care criteria.”

The same paradigm exists now in the Netherlands for euthanizing the elderly because they are “tired of life” or for non-life-threatening conditions, even existential suffering. Thus, the 2010 report quoted above also approved the euthanasia of a woman in her eighties who “could no longer do the things

that made life worthwhile to her,” such as “reading, philosophising, debating, politics, art and so on.” The report explained that she “had always been very independent and had considered this her greatest asset” but was deteriorating physically.

“She considered it a blessing that she could end her life with the help of euthanasia and would not have to become dependent.

The unbearable nature of her suffering was due to her loss of the ability to live a meaningful life.” Certainly, everyone will empathize with the distress a once-vigorous person feels as she experiences debilitation. But often this kind of depression is treatable with proper geriatric psychiatric interventions. Yet there was no indication in the report that psychiatric treatment was even attempted. Despite this, the committee approved the woman’s euthanasia as “in accordance with the statutory due care criteria.”

In a better world, mental health professionals would push back against killing those suffering existential anguish or certified mental illnesses, no matter how severe. But the Dutch psychiatric journal Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie took the opposite tack, calling euthanasia “an emancipation of the psychiatric patient and psychiatry itself.”

According to the article, psychiatrists would be wrong to refuse to kill a patient merely based on personal beliefs: “Categorical rejection of help [to die] in psychiatry represents a failure [to respect] the autonomy of psychiatric patients.” And so the last line of defense against the suicides of mentally ill and deeply depressed people—a dedicated mental health professional fighting for the life of every patient—has surrendered to the euthanasia imperative.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) also has condemned doctors who refuse to euthanize legally qualified patients

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because they have conscientious ended when the doctor was Swiss suicide clinics do objections. In its 2011 position imprisoned in 2000 for murder not restrict their services to paper, the KNMG admits that after videotaping himself lethally the terminally ill. Many of “most physicians find it difficult injecting a man suffering from their customers are disabled or to perform euthanasia or assisted Lou Gehrig’s Disease.) But now, depressed. For example, the suicide,” but still insists that a Kevorkianism is back in the form parents of Daniel James made doctor who “is not prepared to of “suicide tourism,” the flow of headlines when they flew their consider a euthanasia request people traveling to Switzerland son from the United Kingdom from patients . . . must then put the to be killed at the country’s legal to Switzerland to commit suicide patient in touch with a colleague suicide clinics. after he was paralyzed from who does not have fundamental Assisted suicide was legalized injuries sustained while playing objections to euthanasia and in Switzerland in 1942. Unlike rugby. assisted suicide.” In other words, the situation in the Netherlands There have also been joint the KNMG holds that every suicides in Swiss clinics, Dutch physician is ethically most notably the famous required to be complicit in English conductor Sir legal euthanasia, either by Edward Downes and doing the deed or referring his wife Joan, who flew to a colleague willing to kill. together to Switzerland to The same paper die at the assisted suicide explains that when facility run by the advocacy patients do not qualify group Dignitas—a decision for euthanasia, a doctor endorsed in the media by may legally refer them to their children. (Joan had how-to-commit-suicide been diagnosed with cancer, literature, and then discuss and Sir Edward was almost the literature with them, blind.) in order to help them kill Dignitas was also themselves. If the patient instrumental in bringing a decides to deny himself case to the Swiss Supreme food and water, the doctor Court to legalize assisted must supervise his care suicide for the mentally ill. and “alleviate the suffering The court complied, ruling, by arranging effective “It must be recognized that palliative care.” an incurable, permanent, To review: According serious mental disorder can to the KNMG, it is cause similar suffering as a unprofessional for a doctor physical disorder, making to refuse to participate life unbearable to the patient in euthanasia—either by in the long term.” Once doing the deed or referring “The Pedlar” from Hans Holbein’s series of engravings, “Dance the ideological premises of of Death” (1538/1563). so the deed can be done— assisted suicide are accepted, when a legally qualified ultimately there is no way to patient asks for euthanasia. But and Belgium, in Switzerland stop its expansion. it is perfectly acceptable for a anyone can participate as long Swiss law does not permit physician to teach patients how the reason for helping is not a actual euthanasia, that is, when to commit suicide if they don’t “selfish motive.” For decades, the the lethal act is performed qualify for euthanasia under the Swiss law made barely a ripple. by someone other than the law. That is an example of why it But then, with the emergence person who dies. But that soon is called the culture of death. of an international euthanasia may change, thanks to a court In the last decade, Switzerland movement, enterprising ruling that refused to penalize has become Jack Kevorkian as a ideologues opened new facilities, a doctor who inserted a lethal country. During the 1990s, about creating a growth industry. In drip into a paralyzed patient’s 130 disabled, depressed, and/ 2011 the nation’s two primary vein. According to media reports or terminally ill people traveled assisted suicide facilities helped about the case, the court ruled from all over the United States a staggering 560 people to kill that since the patient wished to to Kevorkian’s home state of themselves (up from 350 in die, “the doctor in this case had a Michigan to commit suicide 2006). That’s nearly two suicides medical and moral duty to break with his help. (The suicide trips each day. the law.”

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Advocacy groups have wielded suicide tourism as a cudgel to shatter the public’s resistance to legalizing assisted suicide— just as the line of people flying to Michigan in the 1990s helped to soften up America. England has been particularly targeted for the argument that people should be able to kill themselves at home, surrounded by family, rather than having to fly to Switzerland to do it. Polling shows that this argument resonates with many Europeans, indicating that at least some people now view suicide as a necessity in circumstances involving serious illness or disability.

What conclusions can we draw from the European euthanasia experience that might be of use in the United States as we grapple with these issues?

First, once assisted suicide or euthanasia is legalized, it will not long remain a limited enterprise.

This is not a “slippery slope” alarmist projection but a conclusion abundantly demonstrated by facts on the ground in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Once euthanasia gains widespread public and medical professional support, the supposedly strict guidelines designed to prevent “abuses” become, at most, low hurdles easily circumvented or ignored.

Second, legalizing euthanasia changes culture. Not only do the categories of people eligible for euthanasia expand, but the rest of society generally ceases to think that it matters. This desensitizing, in turn, affects how people perceive the moral value of the seriously ill, disabled, and elderly—and perhaps how they view themselves.

Third, euthanasia corrupts medical ethics by mutating the role of doctors into purveyors of death rather than consistent enablers of life. The hospice movement seeks to improve life by maximizing the patient’s health, comfort, and inclusion in the human community until

his natural death. In contrast, euthanasia intentionally cuts short the patient’s life through lethal means. To put it another way, hospice is about living, euthanasia is about dying.

Fourth, once a person is deemed the member of a killable caste, it becomes easier to reduce his worth to that of a mere natural resource that can be exploited for the benefit of society.

Finally, I think widespread popular acceptance of euthanasia in Europe—recent polls show strong support, including in relatively conservative countries like Poland—is a symptom of cultural nihilism. Consider: A hundred years ago, when people really did die in agony, there was little call for legalizing euthanasia.

Yet today, when most pain can be significantly alleviated if not eliminated, we see calls for socalled “death with dignity.”

Clearly, more is going on than just a desire to eliminate suffering.

What is the antidote? Love.

We all age. We fall ill. We grow weak. We become disabled. Life can get very hard. Euthanasia raises the fundamental question of whether our culture will retain the moral capacity to sustain a culture of care for those who have entered life’s most difficult stages.

On that question, it seems to me, hangs the moral future of Western civilization. For as the Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne has cogently warned: “A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.”

Mr. Smith is a senior fellow with the Center on Human Exceptionalism at the Discovery Institute in the U.S. He is also a consultant with the Patients’ Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture. This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of First Things magazine (firstthings.com).

Reprinted with permission.

Europa y sus bárbaros: El espíritu de la cultura europea by Ignacio Sánchez Cámara (Rialp, 2012): The author, professor of legal philosophy at the University of La Coruña, offers a profound diagnosis of the problems facing Europe. He reminds readers that Europe—which is seen as both a cultural ideal and a political (and ethical) community—has its roots in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, but laments that many Europeans have rejected this inheritance.

He argues that all of Europe’s current problems stem from a deep moral crisis which has been exacerbated by relativism and secularism, and that without a renewal of culture, Europe will continue its descent into barbarism.

Europe, Sánchez Cámara suggests, must honor its Christian roots in order to once again serve as a civilizational model for the rest of the world. This is the first of three planned volumes on the moral and political crisis of European civilization.

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Are Human Rights Helpful or Harmful?

Christiaan Alting von Geusau We cannot start a discussion of the topic of human rights without going back to one of the sources: Saint Thomas Aquinas. We need him—and many other sources that I will discuss—to be able to grasp the essence of this topic, because it is exactly the insufficient study and understanding of the sources of Western civilization by the educational, legal, and political establishment of modernity that has led us to the point where we have to ask the politically incorrect question: Whether human rights are helpful or harmful?

Saint Thomas says in Question 96, Article 4 of the Summa Theologica: “Laws formed by man are either just or unjust. If they be just, they have the power of binding in conscience, from the eternal law whence they are derived.”

A just law is always directed at the common good, he goes on to say, and later quotes St. Augustine’s well-known maxim that “a law that is not just, seems to be no law at all.” Such laws do not bind in conscience because of their lawlessness.

For many learned people, what is being quoted and explained here is obvious and in need of no further explanation.

But this is certainly not so for the wider world and especially where it concerns the interpretation of human rights law, both on the national and international level.

Here we are seeing a worrying trend of what I would like to call “legal relativism” or the “rule of desire” instead of the “rule of law”, leading to a system of laws that is based on opinion and feelings rather than fact.

It is exactly the lack of formation by the majority of people in the sources of Western thought,

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and especially the foundations of law that has led us here. There is one contemporary thinker that has an especially keen understanding of this problem: Joseph Ratzinger.

He observes in his well-known discussion with the agnostic philosopher Jürgen Habermas in The Dialectics of Secularization: “The majority principle always leaves

St. Thomas Aquinas, as painted by Carlo Crivelli in 1476.

open the question of the ethical foundations of the law.”

It should be understood from this that majority does not equal truth and democracy does not equal God, the measure of all things. Already Plato understood this and—although not in any way familiar with the Judeo-Christian-tradition—said that “not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.” This idea, this concept, is eminently lost on the modern secular mind, if not outright rejected. This reality of secular doctrine is turning a system of

human rights originally designed to defend life, dignity, and liberty into a system that is now increasingly threatening life, dignity, and liberty under the guise of those same human rights—especially the so-called “rights” to freedom of choice, privacy, and non-discrimination.

In order for us to understand better what is at stake here, and how we have come to this point, we will first have a look at the current practice of human rights in Europe and the United States.

These examples show that the “tyranny of choice” in fact undermines human life and human rights. It also contradicts common sense.

Human Rights in Practice Two recent judgments of leading European Courts shed a light on the reality of the application of human rights law. First, the ruling of the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany or BVerfG) on 11 January 2011 on the German Trans-sexuality Law has opened a whole new— and problematic—chapter in the enforcement of the constitutional human dignity principle, enshrined in Article 1 of the German Basic Law of 1949. The case concerned a person born as a male, but no longer wanting to be a man and therefore now taking on a female identity (“Mrs. L.I.”). After having performed what is referred to as the “small solution” to alter his gender, namely the change of name in official documents, Mrs. L.I. subsequently entered into a relationship with a woman. The couple then wanted to conclude a same-sex civil partnership. The German Trans-sexuality Law, however, barred them from entering into this civil partnership because the law requires that the

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person having changed its gender first undergoes an operation taking away the physical attributes of the original gender as well as the capacity to procreate (the so-called “big solution”). It also requires that the new gender identity is being lived by the person concerned and has led to public recognition of the new sex.

The reason for these requirements is to uphold the distinctive nature of same-sex civil partnerships—namely that it is a legal instrument exclusively meant for people of the same gender whereby the relationship itself logically excludes the natural possibility of procreation. The Court ruled however that the legal requirement to physically change the gender and remove the procreative capacity from the body before being allowed to enter into a same-sex civil partnership violated Mrs. L.I.’s constitutional right to the respect of human dignity and sexual self-determination as derived from Article 2, Section 1, in combination with Article 1, Section 1 of the Basic Law. The Court ruled this in spite of the fact that, legally speaking, the couple would have been able to enter into a civil heterosexual marriage since the law is exclusively based on the physical attributes of the gender of each of the partners, not their personal preferences.

This ruling is highly problematic for various reasons.

First of all, the Court’s decision undermines the same-sex civil partnership law itself. By nature of the specific relationships it is asked to govern, the law has to build upon a set of physical realities or prerequisites which are the reason why this law was introduced in the first place. These realities are that the persons involved are of the same sex and do not have procreative abilities as a couple.

The constitutional human dignity argument is used, however, to claim that it is unfair to require the objective physical realities of such relationship to be decisive for the legal instrument as such,

instead placing the subjective considerations of the persons involved on the foreground.

This reasoning cannot be considered as a solid basis for any law, let alone as an indicator of a violation of human dignity. The latter always relates to a concrete event—as the Court repeatedly says throughout its established case law—that is in disregard of the dignity of the human being (whereby the way the person feels or experiences this is not what counts, but rather the objective reality of how this person is affected).

Requiring a person by law to undergo a gender-change operation would indeed be in violation of its human dignity. But this is not the case here. The law merely stipulates the conditions that need to be met in order to be able to conclude a certain form of civil partnership.

Requiring that both partners in a same-sex civil partnership by law should have the physical attributes of the same gender is not a violation of their human dignity because it is the essence of this law without which there is no point in having such a law.

Although the Court seems to admit this, it still concludes that in this specific situation, the human dignity of the claimant was violated by applying that same law.

This conclusion is contradictory as it recognizes on the one hand the need for the law to be based on certain objective factual prerequisites, while on the other hand concluding that in this case asking for these prerequisites to be met violates the claimant’s human dignity principle.

It seems the Court in this case has again applied its well-known “principle of reasonableness” but has done so at the peril of undermining the law in a fundamental way. It is unclear how the Court sees it possible for this law to be effectively upheld in the future, now that it has denied the state the right to enforce its core provision of partners in a samesex civil partnership needing to be of the same sex.

A second example is the Chamber Judgment in the Case of P and S v. Poland, the socalled “right to abortion” case. In this case, the European Court of Human Rights held on 30 October 2012 that a teenage girl who was raped should have been given unhindered access to an abortion in a Polish hospital because she had “a right” to a “lawful abortion.” The Court in Strasbourg concluded, amongst other things, that there had been two violations of Article 8—the right to respect for private and family life—of the European Convention on Human Rights because of access being hindered to a “lawful abortion.”

Without in any way downplaying the utter drama and personal suffering of those involved in this specific case, it cannot be overlooked how the Court’s decision in this matter represents a dangerous development towards making abortion a “human right.”

What sort of a legal system do we “enlightened” Europeans think we have that makes the deliberate killing of an innocent and defenseless human being into a “human right”?

A human rights practice that denies the principles of the created order, which are also the foundations of justice and the rule of law, becomes totalitarian and a direct threat to human life and dignity, and thus to liberty, which it was supposed to protect. As Benedict XVI said it in his 2013 Message for the World Day of Peace, “[w]ithout the truth about man inscribed by the Creator in the human heart, freedom and love become debased, and justice loses the ground of its exercise.”

This is exactly what is happening both in the debate about human rights and with the application of human rights as such: Our concept of justice is being morphed into a vague and individualistic concept of “personal choice.” What counts is no longer that which is—namely reality—but rather what I feel today (since tomorrow I may feel different). This human tendency is

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The Threads of Natural Law: Unravelling a Philosophical Tradition, edited by Francisco José Contreras (Springer, 2013): This collection of academic essays focuses on natural law and provides readers with a comprehensive examination of the origins, development, and influence of the concept over the centuries.

Beginning with a consideration of the Greek polis, and exploring the seminal political ideas of Plato and Aristotle, the essays in this collection then explore how the concept of natural law was further elaborated

by Cicero—before receiving systematic treatment and elaboration during the Scholastic Age. Looking at some of the seminal moments in history when natural law concepts were challenged and then defended, these essays explore how natural law ideas enabled moral, legal, and political dialogue between people of different traditions—and explores its impact on contemporary debates.

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not new; St. Paul already lamented in his letter to the Philippians that for many “their God is their stomach.”

We have seen how allowing this tendency to rule the application of law, especially where it concerns human rights, leads to “the law” becoming unruly, ultimately leading to chaos. Initially, this chaos is disguised as a “tolerant” or “inclusive” society that thinks itself to be truly enlightened. But under this rather thin disguise, we find in reality something very different: broken lives and families, guilt, addiction, loneliness, and a yearning for moral clarity.

Again, it is Joseph Ratzinger who formulates this problem and the answer to it so well: “There is a need to renounce that false peace promised by the idols of this world along with the dangers which accompany it, that false peace which dulls consciences, which leads to self-absorption, to a withered existence lived in indifference. The pedagogy of peace, on the other hand, implies activity, compassion, solidarity, courage, and perseverance.”

When the “tyranny of choice” starts ruling us, then choice becomes a “supreme right” trumping all else—also the rule of law itself. This leads to the concept of human dignity, and the rights based on it, to become relative. The human rights claimed under such a tyranny are either being harmed or become harmful themselves, because human life, dignity, and liberty become mere “interests” to be weighed against other interests.

The strongest then always reigns and the “rule of law” is replaced by the “rule of desire”, the strongest desire. Therefore, we need to humanize human rights again and rediscover the true foundations of law. For that, we first need to understand the history of human rights.

Brief History of Human Rights Human rights, it is generally agreed by scholars, find their origin in the American and French

revolutions of 1776 and 1789— that is to say, in the formulation and proclamation of a catalogue of fundamental rights that, as the historian Lynn Hunt says, have three interlocking qualities: Rights must be natural, equal, and universal. All humans everywhere possess them equally because they are human beings. The 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens declared these three qualities specifically, in contrast to, for example, the 1689 English Bill of Rights that only spoke of “ancient rights and liberties.”

But there is also a distinct difference that needs to be made between the Philadelphia and Paris declarations. We can trace the consequences of this difference to today: Whereas the Americans pointed explicitly to God the Creator as the origin of the inherent Rights of Man, the French did not.

This caused an important turning point in European history as it led Man, and therefore the state, to believe that it was the guarantor, if not the giver, of these rights.

A great paradox lies here that exists until today: If we believe we have “inalienable” or “natural” rights, we therefore say they are a given, an attribute that exists automatically for every human being, independently of the state, and not given or taken by it or any other human being. This being the case, where do they come from? If one leaves out God, it can only be Man itself, even if it is not so expressed. If this is the case, these rights can therefore be taken away by Man, and thus lose their absolute character. This is paradoxical because the whole idea of human rights was for them to be absolute and non-negotiable. This dichotomy led to the enormous bloodshed immediately following the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, where apparently those rights that where only recently proclaimed to be natural, equal, and universal, were not deemed to be applicable for all. The same

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can be said for slavery in the US, which was retained even after the Declaration of Independence.

The reality was and is today that human rights are only attainable for those who participate in a political community. Those who have no voice, history shows us again and again, have no rights In spite of the lofty 18th century ideas about “natural rights”, slavery continued for many years, as did all sorts of torture and killing on an ever larger scale. It needed the staggering cruelty and death caused by the Nazis and Communists in the 20th century to finally push the world to make a new effort in formulating and enforcing human rights: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was then followed by a flurry of human rights documents, national and international.

What brought politicians across the board to endorse these far-reaching—often supranational —legal instruments was the experience of human dignity being violated on a massive scale never before witnessed in the history of mankind. In the aftermath of World War II, politicians were confronted with all sorts of atrocities and millions of harrowing stories of men trampling on men under a wide array of ideologies and totalitarian systems: Nazism, Communism, Nationalism—and, yes, hedonism and individualism.

The following is but one of countless examples that show us how deep we humans can fall: The historian Martin Gilbert quotes a survivor of the Holocaust in his monumental book, The Holocaust: “When a transport with children up to three years old arrived[,] ‘The workers were told to dig one big hole into which the children were thrown and buried alive.

My husband recollected this with horror. He couldn’t forget how the earth had been rising until the children suffocated’.”

When we bring to mind such atrocities, and the safe comfort from which we can reject its incomprehensible madness, can

we equally vehemently reject and push back the much larger scale of innocent and defenseless human life being destroyed today in full view of society—not in far-flung concentration camps behind barbed wire? Where are the lofty ideals of universal and inalienable human rights solemnly proclaimed in 1776, 1789, 1948, and as recent as 2009 with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union? Yes, much good has been achieved through these monumental documents, but immeasurable injustice remains.

The history of human rights has shown us two things, two harsh

A portrait of a young Hannah Arendt. realities that have been part of every phase of human history, despite the best international treaties and solemn proclamations. The first of these realities is what the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić describes so well in her book, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, on the Balkan wars: “The mass killings of the 20th century, and the mass violations of human dignity, were not mostly performed by monsters as we like to see it comfortably—no, they were performed mostly by ordinary human beings to whom the mass killings actually made sense.”

The second reality of human rights practice is highlighted by the Jewish political scientist Hannah

Arendt in her masterful 1949 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Human rights and their loudly asserted ‘inalienable’ character can only effectively be upheld for those who have a voice in a political community,” she says. Once this voice has been lost, either directly or indirectly, no lofty proclamation can help. History, from 1776 to today, abounds with examples: the slaves, the Jews, the persecuted Christians and other religions around the world, the tortured prisoners, the approximately 40 million voiceless, unborn human beings killed annually around the world—all having died or suffered at the hands of other human beings who thought that such killing and inhuman treatment were justified.

This brings us to the problem of understanding Man in secular society—or understanding human dignity. There is no lack of human rights instruments today, nor are those same documents per se harmful to human rights. As noted before, much good has been achieved. The problem does not lie with human rights themselves but with the anthropology, or rather lack of anthropology, that underpins them. In order to humanize the practice of human rights—to indeed let them be natural, equal, and universal—we need to re-introduce into secular society a correct understanding of Man—a correct Menschenbild as we would say in German—an understanding of human dignity and its roots.

The framers of the 1948 universal Declaration of Human Rights famously said “we agree about the rights but on condition no one asks why.” This, combined with the relativistic mindset that accompanied the development of human rights discourse in Western society since the 18th century, has led to the current state of affairs where what is called “human rights” can become harmful. The distinction between “inherent rights” and “personal choice” has been blurred under the banner of “non-discrimination”, “privacy”,

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and “freedom of choice.” All order, is that this world order state and is infinitely more valuable this should be clarified by taking should be a civilization of respect than the state. A single human the time and effort to explain and love.” soul is infinitely more important the essence of what it means to Human dignity then, and the than the most powerful of states. be human. Only the Christian human rights based on it, cannot be The state is a product of humans, understanding of Man can offer upheld without love of neighbor, after all. Human dignity then, and a satisfactory explanation, but it charity—indiscriminately applied. the human rights based on it, can need not be in overtly religious Second, in order to understand only be upheld when the elevated terminology. The truth of the Man, its dignity, and the way in nature of Man is understood. human being can be understood Third, we return here to by reason. It is embedded in St. Thomas who observes human nature itself, accessible in Question 97, Part I of to all. the Summa: “[T]he natural Allow me to give a few law contains certain key elements of this for further universal precepts, which are reflection: First, Benedict XVI everlasting.” Whereas human starts his Encyclical, Caritas in law can be changed, natural Veritate, with an explanation law cannot. And so it is with of what is the principal Man’s inherent dignity; it driving force behind authentic cannot be changed because development of the human it derives from the natural person, the force that leads to law, the order of creation. justice and peace: It is charity in That is why St. Thomas says, truth; it is love. Understanding “consequently we must say Man in secular society—really that the natural law, as to grasping its inherent human general principles, is the same dignity in its true form, which for all.” is the only foundation for Human dignity then, and human rights that are truly human rights based on them, human—requires a deep sense can only be upheld when they of charity and a selfless love are considered unchangeable that does not reject the truth, and always valid for every inconvenient as it often is. human being—no exceptions The philosopher Mette granted. Otherwise they Lebech describes the centrality become fully arbitrary. of love in understanding and applying human dignity well: Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School and Some Final Thoughts “We call the pure appreciation former US Ambassador to the Holy See. Photograph courtesy As we come to the of the Lumen Christi Institute. of the individuality of the conclusion, again the question other self, love. Love sees should be raised: Are human potential everywhere, even where which to protect it through the rights helpful or are they harmful? great effort is needed to bring application of human rights, we Not only is the term human rights it to fulfillment. It also bears need to be clear on the essence itself becoming more problematic, disappointment and understands, and role of the state. The state is the many new perceived “human where only rudiments of meaning not a person, it is not a source of rights” are actually undermining seem to exist. It advocates the rights values—as St. Edith Stein puts or effectively destroying the real of the weak, the young and the old, it so well in her treatise on the human rights of Man: life, dignity, and it protects them against abuses state—it is rather a community’s and liberty. This conclusion is by stronger parties and interests. tool devised to realize already not new. In 1991, the American Against this background it is not so existing values and principles. It is jurist and diplomat Mary Ann strange that it is only in love that not the state which has a soul but Glendon already warned of this we adequately identify the other, the people who live in it. We need in her book, Rights Talk. In it she and therefore not so strange either to understand this to keep the state says the interplay between rights that we should have to rely on it from imposing its “proto-values” and responsibility, and freedom in practice in order to give content that do not serve the common good and order, has been lost. “Our to the idea of human dignity. What and which are not human. Each rights talk,” she says, “in its we say when we claim that the human soul, because it is created by absoluteness promotes unrealistic principle of human dignity is the God alone and not by any human expectations … in its relentless basis of the international world structure, always stands above the individualism, it fosters a climate

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that is inhospitable” for the weak, the losers in this battle for human rights, and leaves no room for dialogue.

Two examples illustrate this point: First, currently a real and open debate on whether or not to allow gays to marry is nonexistent because an honest dialogue is simply not being permitted.

Whoever dares to question the validity of the argument of nondiscrimination made by those wanting to redefine marriage to include people of the same sex is almost automatically labeled as homophobic or discriminatory, even though increasingly gays and lesbians themselves speak out against same sex “marriage.”

Second: the language being used by abortion proponents, with its exclusive focus on women’s privacy and “the right to choose”, leaves no room for the weakest human being under the law, the unborn child. Why should the life of one human being automatically supersede the life of another human being? Relentless individualism simply leaves no room for real dialogue; and the victims are the innumerable aborted children who had nobody to speak for them. This is what Czech statesman Vaclav Havel warned about when he wrote that words—in this case, “human rights”—that were once “rays of light” have easily turned into “lethal arrows.” This is what is happening today when we hear calls for a “right to abortion” or traditional marriage laws are called discriminatory.

Human rights are not about the rights and freedom to do whatever I want or feel; they are about protecting what is and has always been and will always be— only to be found in the reality of the natural created order—visible and understandable to all, irrespective of religion or culture. It shows us how we were created, with what we have been endowed, and what this means in practice—a reality check, so to speak. What we have to do is to teach secular society to see, listen, and think again, and to draw logic conclusions from reality.

Let me give you a final reason why this is so important. In March 2013, the Irish government cosponsored with the United Nations and Amnesty International an event at the UN where abortion activists and abortionists were portrayed as “human rights defenders”, as “defenders working on reproductive rights, particularly abortion providers in their role in assisting women to alter their ‘natural’ roles as mother and caregiver.” This reminds us of the “newspeak” described by George Orwell.

You might wonder why this fixation on abortion? Don’t we have other problems and human rights issues? Yes, we do. But none of these will ever be solved if we don’t get it right with the most fundamental of human rights: the right to life and dignity. It is the basis with which our entire human rights system stands or falls. Without a solid right to life, all other rights will eventually be violated or become irrelevant because they stem from human life itself.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says it well: “God places the human creature at the center and summit of the created order”—not its feelings and opinions but its being—its life.

Transcendence needs to be made understood again in our secular society to make human rights truly helpful again. Perhaps we should remember the beautiful words of Psalm 8: “You have made him little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet.”

Dr. Alting von Geusau, J.D., LL.M. is General Counsel and Chief Development Officer at the International Theological Institute (ITI) in Trumau, Austria.

This article is based on a lecture originally given at the ITI on 14 March 2013. It is based on his book, Human Dignity and the Law in Post-War Europe: Roots and Reality of an Ambiguous Concept, published in March 2013 by Wolf Legal Publishers.

It is published here with permission.

Human Dignity and the Law in Post-War Europe: Roots and Reality of an Ambiguous Concept by Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau (Wolf Legal Publishers, 2013): This book considers the concept of human dignity as a worthwhile ideal not just for human rights lawyers, but for philosophers and politicans everywhere. Alting von Geusau provides a critical analysis of the legal norm of human dignity as codified in 2009 in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. He assesses the philosophical and historical roots of the concept, and provides an assement of current legal applications and case law.

Focusing on the roots of the concept of human dignity in post-war thinking, the author provides a critical examination of all those who have violated this dignity—arguing that the protection of human dignity is not just a distant legal concept but a reality that concerns every human being everywhere.

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Reflections on European Multiculturalism Frits Bolkestein According to postmodernists, facts are inseparable from the observer who claims to discern them. In academese this is sometimes called the “theoryladenness of observation.” It implies that objectivity is an illusion, since all we have is competing perspectives based on each person’s necessarily biased viewpoint. This being so, philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) wrote that the postmodernist had better tell us about himself. Such a postmodern point of view leads to subjectivism.

In political terms, subjectivism implies intercultural equality—and calls are then heard for “respect” and “affirmation”. Gellner likened subjectivism to Romanticism, with its focus on authenticity.

But if postmodernists repudiate not just superficial objectivity but also objectivity as such, one wonders how they would deal with mathematics—or with blatant lies, since the focus on the validity of differing perspectives and on authenticity deliberately sets the question of truth aside.

Much recent cultural relativism is an offshoot of postmodernism, especially that which maintains that all standards are expressions of culture. So there is no sense in trying to criticize cultures as a whole; there is no supra-cultural or meta-perspective—and especially no Enlightenment-style view from nowhere. Thus relativism entails nihilism and, as a social or political attitude, it is valueless. It is also self-contradictory, for the relativist must endorse the absolutism of others.

Cultural anthropology has also played large a part in the evangelization of relativism. The German-American thinker, Franz Boas (1858-1942), who has been called the father of American anthropology, maintained that the differences between cultures

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were greater than their similarities.

When studying a foreign culture one should therefore leave one’s own culture and norms behind, said Boas. But one would never have no culture or no perspective, since there is no such thing as an Enlightenment “view from nowhere.” Would it be possible to shed one’s own culture without acquiring a different culture— and thus being left with the same problem as before?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. Photograph courtesy of AEI.

Any ranking of cultures needs a yardstick and the best yardstick I know is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to its critics, the Declaration is of Western cultural origin and, therefore, imperialistic. The Committee that drafted it shortly after the United Nations was founded was headed

by Eleanor D. Roosevelt (18841962). At that time almost all of Africa and Asia were still colonized.

Japan, Germany, and Italy had been defeated recently and could not take part in the drafting. So the Committee consisted mainly of Western nations like the US, the UK, France, and Australia on the one hand, and members of the

Soviet bloc on the other. When it came to a vote, the latter abstained.

The Communist’s position is understandable, for the Declaration made a strong plea for the classical human rights in the tradition of 18th century liberalism. But the conveners had made a strenuous effort to include representatives of every religion and region in the world, including Chinese, Islamic, and Hindu. Nonetheless, in 1947 the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association decided not to endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the ground that is was an ethnocentric document.

The allegedly Western origin of the Universal Declaration is often used by its detractors to defend practices which are at variance with it. The former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, has often come out in support of what he calls “Asian Values.” Asian values supposedly clash with the Universal Declaration because they are said to lay more stress upon the collective than upon the individual who is prized by the West. Mr. Lee makes two arguments. The first is that Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, that there has been “an erosion of the moral underpinnings of […] society and the diminution of personal responsibility.” In the Asian model “the individual exists in the context of his family.” This means “the belief in thrift, hard work, filial piety, loyalty in the extended family and […] the respect for scholarship and learning.” The second argument is that these “Asian Values” are conducive to economic success.

The former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamed, has often supported Mr. Lee. At the World Conference of Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 the foreign minister of Singapore warned that “universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity.” The

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Chinese foreign minister added that “individuals must put the states’ rights before their own.”

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has opposed these views saying that “there are no quintessential values that separate the Asians as a group from people in the rest of the world.” As an example he quotes the great Mogul emperor Akbar, who reigned between 1556 and 1605 and preached religious tolerance when the Inquisition was in full throttle in Europe. Sen further writes that democracy is a universal value. “Universal consent is not required for something to be of universal value. Rather, the claim of universal value is that people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable.” I am sure the protesters at Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and even those who took to the streets of Tehran, Tunis, and Cairo, twenty years later agree with him.

It is not only Asian or other regional groups that seek collective rights but also religious groups.

There is a catalog of Islamic values which subordinates every right to the Sharia, sometimes even called “Islamic rights.” But the constant flow of Muslims to Western Europe and the United States proves that many want to escape from the culture—in its anthropological not aesthetic or normative sense— which these values supposedly inform. But the preference of Middle Eastern Muslims for living in the West is surrounded by a great deal of hypocrisy.

If one takes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as yardstick, it becomes possible to rank cultures. In particular, it becomes clear that after many centuries of gruesome bloodletting, Western culture is at present superior to that of the Muslim world. Any objective observer of the Middle East will support this conclusion. It is also borne out by the Arab Human Development Report, published in 2002 by UNDP and written by the Egyptian political scientist Nader Fergany.

The report blames the backward

condition of the Middle East on the lack of knowledge, of freedom and the dearth of “woman power.”

These are matters of culture.

But it was not always so that the Arab world was backward. Particularly during the great Omayyad and Abbassid Caliphates, the Arab world was much further advanced than contemporaneous civilizations in Europe. Nevertheless, it is an interesting fact that now almost no one is prepared to affirm the superiority of Western culture.

Whoever dares do so is considered arrogant, triumphalist, or Eurocentrist. But the facts are clear and the unwillingness to see them betrays a lack of confidence in Western culture.

Not long ago the term “multiculturalism” and “diversity” replaced “cultural relativism.” An article titled “What is multiculturalism?” published in 1999 by Bhikhu Parekh, professor of political philosophy at the University of Westminster and member of the National Committee on Race Relations, outlined some of the insights of multiculturalism: First, human beings are culturally embedded; second, “different cultures represent different systems of meaning and visions of the good life”; third, this does not mean that all cultures deserve equal respect, but it does mean that no culture has the right to impose itself on others; and fourth, each culture defines itself in terms of its differences from others by whom it feels threatened.

Unfortunately, modern-day liberalism marginalizes such values as “human solidarity, community, a sense of rootedness, selflessness, deep and self-effacing humility, and contentment.” But a good society respects its members’ rights to their culture. It cannot be stable without a common sense of belonging— that is, a shared commitment to the political community. As a personal feeling, it is known as patriotism. The political community must value all its members equally and reflect this in its policies: “group-differentiated rights, culturally differentiated applications of laws […], state

The Intellectual Temptation: Dangerous Ideas in Politics by Frits Bolkestein (AuthorHouse, 2013): Originally published in Dutch in 2011, Bolkestein’s examination of the role of intellectuals in politics and society deserves broad readership.

The author traces three centuries of bad ideas in politics and public life.

Bolkestein also provides a consideration of the roots of the concept of individual liberty and explains why so many ideologues are opposed to it. Drawing from his experiences in national office and at the European level, Bolkestein’s main thesis is that intellectuals’ ideas are problematic when they become political ideas—because they are neither derived from nor falsifiable by experience.

He recommends instead a “politics of prudence” and a return to Classicism as a way to avoid what he calls the “intellectual temptation.”

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support for minority institutions and a judicious programme of affirmative action.” Citizens must feel that they are welcome. Since social recognition is central to their identity, misrecognition “can only be countered by a rigorous critique of the dominant culture and radically restructuring the prevailing inequalities of economic and political power.”

The crucial term here is “groupdifferentiated rights.” This subject is also raised by Jutta Limbach, president of the German Federal Constitutional Court from 1994 to 2002, who notes that parallel societies are emerging across Europe because minority cultures are excluded by the majority. As a result inferiority complexes are spreading.

An important cause of terrorism is humiliation, which is why terrorist leaders are so successful in recruiting lost and frustrated young men. The German Constitution makes no mention of minority protection in the form of a collective right. There is no duty to “protect and foster the cultural identity and autonomy of an ethnic or religious minority.”

Yet this is what should happen, she affirms. And there should not be a “dominant culture” (Leitkultur) but “the behaviour of a religious minority may not conflict with the basic values of [the German] constitution, even if it is grounded in religious law.” This is an aspect which Bhikhu Parekh omits, but which is crucial for maintaining modern democratic order.

What we must remember is that rights need to include the right to say “no.” This is related to the right to exit for members of minority groups. But such a right can only exist where the principles of liberal democracy are firmly established and always trump the collective rights of the minority. Limbach thinks in particular of the 3.2 million Muslim immigrants in Germany, almost all of Turkish descent.

One such immigrant is the Istanbul-born writer Necla Kelek, who moved to Germany at the age of ten. She draws attention to the Cairo Declaration of Human

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Rights in Islam, which was decided upon by 45 foreign ministers of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and intended to be an appendix to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cairo Declaration is not binding but illuminates the global attitude of Islam. Art. 24 says: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia.” Art. 25 adds: “The Islamic Sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification [of] any of the articles of this declaration.” The Declaration’s Preamble, furthermore, affirms “the civilizing and historical role of the Islamic Ummah, which God made the best nation that has given mankind a universal and wellbalanced civilization.” No talk here of the individual but rather of the collective. On the basis of these statements, Kelek concludes that Islam may be diverse in details but not in fundamentals; that Islam is not a religion like any other; and that critics of Islam should not be styled denunciators, as the fashionable press has been wont to bill them.

Recently, Limbach, and Kelek took part in an international debate around Perlentaucher, a German online magazine. (The contributions to this debate were later published under the title Islam in Europa.) The debate pit Ian Buruma, author of Murder in Amsterdam, and Timothy Garton Ash against French philosopher Pascal Bruckner and his Leiden Law School compatriots, Profs. Paul Cliteur and Afshin Ellian, the latter of whom is a political refugee from Iran. The issue was the value of the Enlightenment and, in particular, the role of Somali refugee, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in its defense, both nationally and internationally.

Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam (2006) is a journalistic account of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh

by Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri. It contains many interesting details and has met with international acclaim, especially in politically correct circles. But its juxtaposition of, on the one hand, Afshin Ellian—and, by implication, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—

and, and on the other, Mohammed Bouyeri has raised a controversy.

“The fight between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s Jihad,” writes Buruma, “is not just a conflict between culture and universalism but between two visions of what is universal, the one radically secular, the other radically religious.”

Buruma gives the impression of thinking that there is not much to choose between the two versions of universalism. Yet as Cliteur pointed out in the same debate, one battles with the pen while the other decapitates. So the analogy is spurious—“radical” meaning very different things in these two applications. Ellian’s universalism is based on individual rights and thus, by definition, tolerates deviant opinions, whereas Bouyeri’s universalism is based on divine will to which the individual must submit.

What Buruma forgets is that Islamic fundamentalists are free to live under Cliteur’s universalism but not the other way round. In addition, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2009, Buruma avers that Islam “is incidental” to the murder of Theo van Gogh. “Islamic fundamentalists could just as well have chosen a secular ideology to justify bloodshed,” he added. When it was pointed out to him that Mohammed Bouyeri at his trial specifically said he acted out of his Islamic conviction, Buruma drew a specious comparison with the German Baader-Meinhoff Group which murdered without an Islamic conviction.

Another latter-day apologist for political Islam is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Hassan Al-Banna who co-founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ramadan is now a Professor at the University of Oxford in the faculty of theology. He was born in Cairo but now lives in the West, where he frequently calls himself a “Salafist reformer,” He speaks to European audiences of a more accommodating “European Islam,” but when addressing an Islamic audience his views are notably orthodox—thus, the accusation of speaking with a double tongue. The French author Caroline Fourest has made a detailed

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study of this. Paul Berman has also written a detailed analysis of Ramadan’s statements in his book, Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?

In 2007 the New York Times Magazine asked Buruma to write a profile of Tariq Ramadan. Buruma made light of the accusations leveled against Ramadan, saying they were either unfounded or exaggerated.

“We agreed on most subjects,” Buruma wrote of his conversations with Ramadan, concluding that he offered a well-founded, although traditional, view of Islam based on “values which are just as universal as those of the European Enlightenment.” Buruma is unclear in the matter of Islam because of his view of the Enlightenment.

According to him it is conservatives who appeal to the Enlightenment, using it to define Western culture: “The Enlightenment has become the standard of a new conservative order and its enemies are the strangers who do not share our values.”

This is a curious argument.

Does a belief in the values of the Enlightenment make one a conservative? Do socialists not believe in the equality of men and women, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion and the separation of Church and State?

Does such a belief turn one into an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”?

Does this oxymoron mean that multiculturalism should take precedence over the right of women to their own bodies? Is such multiculturalism the new progressive dogma? Buruma here seems above all a bit confused. He creates two opposing positions and wrongly concludes that reasonableness sits in the middle.

“Enlightenment fundamentalism” is often used to decry the Enlightenment by thinkers who resist universal values without being able to propose an alternative. Examples are the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and John Gray of Oxford University. According to Gray, Marxism is a child of the Enlightenment, which taught that man could shape his own future. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

of the Frankfurt School also criticized the Enlightenment from a neo-Marxist point of view. They maintained that the Enlightenment resulted in the moral blindness, the rationalist fallacies and the inhuman utopian thinking of the modern world. Their “critical theory” was an attempt to discover behind the facades of plenty, freedom, and equality, their opposites: lack of individual choice, standardization of products, enslavement, and ultimate dehumanization of man in a mass-producing, highly technological society.

Paul Cliteur (b. 1955) is professor of jurisprudence at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Law in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Leiden.

It is true that democratization and technology have produced a mass culture in which many arts and crafts have disappeared. But to blame the Enlightenment as the Frankfurt School does is laughable. To say that pure rationality has turned into pure irrationality in the totalitarian system that resulted from it is not only worse but also manifestly untrue.

Amnon Rubinstein, Israeli politician and jurist, has dealt with the matter of liberal values in a series of lectures given at Columbia University. He maintains that “equal rights to different cultures should be conditional upon these cultures observing principles of equality among individuals.” Traditional cultures usually heighten the patriarchal status of the bread-

winning man as against the inferior status of the woman, often installing the norm in law. The emergence of the modern state has given rise to a new system of norms, namely liberalism. These norms govern modern society and it is therefore not a “culture” per se in the usual sense of the word, “because it freed itself from the shackles of prior traditions.” Moreover, Rubinstein adds, “the autonomy of the group may severely harm the autonomy of the individual.” This is an answer to Bhiku Parekh’s insistence on collective rights. A group may be extremely repressive of its members.

Rubinstein quotes Susan Okin: “Feminism and multiculturalism do not align with each other.”

A gruesome example is the Indian tradition—now fortunately outlawed—called suttee: the burning alive of widows. Not only were these women assured they would gain great merit but the onlookers would also gain merit. They would, therefore, make sure the widow would not escape, should she change her mind. Is the choice to undergo such an ordeal then freely made?

One should be skeptical of claims that traditions which repress women are freely accepted, whether they be the binding of women’s feet in China or the Islamic burka. In our own time we have heard similar stories of similar sorts of group-prerogatives visited on individuals. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was sexually mutilated. She was made to believe that this was as it should be. She now says that it is a horrible custom, being old enough and wise enough to know.

A few years ago, Ayaan was invited to speak at the opening of the University of Amsterdam’s 2005-6 academic year. A committee of lecturers and students formed with the goal of stopping her. They claimed she carried on a “crusade” against Islam and thereby contributed to a “polarization” of Dutch society.

They also felt the University was losing its identity as a progressive and independent institution. In the end, she spoke. But what can explain the barely contained fury with which socalled “progressive” circles met her?

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The Young Man of Character by Bishop Tihamer Toth (Angelus Press, 2012): Sub-titled “a guide to fortifying and rebuilding the natural foundation of manhood,” this little book explains how to conquer one’s soul and conduct spiritual warfare against one’s baser instincts—in order to earn the “crown of manly character.” Bishop Toth was born at the end of the 19th century in Hungary and devoted his life to writing, preaching, and the salvation of souls.

Through weekly lectures at the University of Budapest, where he was professor of homiletics and pastoral theology, he formed generations of students. This was one of his greatest books, offering reflections on the virtues needed to be a truly virtuous person and examining all the aspects that are necessary for the development of sound character.

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After all, “progressive” used to mean a critical attitude towards religion and a wish to improve the rights of women. Why was the dogma of multiculturalism allowed to override the rights of women in Islamic countries? Why the opposition at home and obsequiousness abroad?

As the anti-Ayaan Committee said, which was headed by a member of the Socialist International, “[Ayaan] does not represent Islamic women.”

The point is that only collectives have a right to speak—and then only through an acceptable or convenient spokesperson. In this case, Tariq Ramadan for Muslims.

Dissidents should be silenced. As Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, has written, “It seem[s] bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam.”

What mindset lures progressive intellectuals to take this stand?

I suggest one possible answer to this question: Ayaan Hirsi Ali shatters an image. A refugee is supposed to come to Holland as a victim who needs help, down-atheel and in need of confirmation of her cultural identity. Ayaan is nothing of the sort. She has learned to speak perfect Dutch and studied in Holland by her own effort. She needs no help, she is elegant, she criticizes the culture into which she was born. All the more, she is fearless. She is hated because she is seen as an invader of the multicultural paradise, in which everyone is free to think exactly what it is correct to think.

Why is this still relevant? It may be objected that multiculturalism is on the way out. It is now being realized that Islamists aim at a voluntary apartheid which would mean an end to a common nation.

More attention is now given to the American view that the individual who becomes a citizen owes allegiance to his new country and is not entitled to a separate status as member of a community.

But intimidation by Islamists continues. A few years ago, the British Centre for Social Cohesion published a report titled, “Victims of Intimidation.” It concerns “freedom

of speech within Europe’s Muslim Communities” and mentions 27 politicians, artists, journalists, and academics who are under serious threat by Islamists. Among them is Ayaan Hirsi Ali who is in constant need of police protection. Another one is Ahmed Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam, who has admitted that he no longer dares enter a mosque (though he is of Moroccan descent).

These people need our support, but do they get it? Instead, the progressive intelligentsia says: Could they not have moderated their tone?

Was it necessary to be so critical?

Was the Islamist reaction not to be expected?

The Danish cartoonist who drew Muhammad, Kurt Westergaard, got minimal support across Europe.

At the beginning of 2006 a Jewish salesman was captured in Paris by an Arabic gang and tortured to death. When in July of 2009 the gang came up for judgment its members got from six months to life imprisonment, which in practice means 22 years. The court was afraid of escalation, and so the case was judged in camera. How much of such intimidation can Europe take and retain its self-respect?

In a liberal democracy tolerance should stem from principled conviction not from fear. Appeasement is most assuredly no way to increase respect of others for our culture. In fact it usually breeds the opposite.

Multiculturalism upheld legally out of fear and guilt will not result in peaceful coexistence but rather the re-tribalization of society, as each looks out for those of his own culture rather than looking to the commonwealth.

Mr. Bolkestein is a writer and former European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Taxation and the Customs Union (1999–2004). He also served as the Dutch Minister for For­ eign Trade (1982-6), Minister of Defence (19868) and Chairman of the Liberal Party (VVD). This an abridged excerpt from Mr. Bolkestein’s 2013 book, The Intellectual Temptation: Dangerous Ideas in Politics. Published with the author’s permission.

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Dietrich von Hildebrand & Europe Denis Kitzinger Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) was considered one of the leading German Catholic intellectuals of the interwar period, and a proficient writer and lecturer.

Born in Florence, Dietrich von Hildebrand converted to Catholicism in 1914 at the age of 24. He began his university studies in Munich before he transferred to Göttingen and received his doctorate of philosophy under the then groundbreaking phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). He completed his doctorate in 1912 and six years later his habilitation under the historian of philosophy Clemens Baeumker (1853-1924) back at the University of Munich where he subsequently became an assistant professor.

During the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic von Hildebrand witnessed first-hand the competition and conflict between two “unions of solidarity”: the nation and the Church. He quickly gained a reputation as an ardent opponent of German nationalism and National Socialism. By 1940 von Hildebrand had fled from National Socialist persecution no less than three times: immediately after the takeover of power in Germany in 1933 he emigrated to Austria; then, after the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938, he fled to France; and in 1940 he finally escaped France for the United States. He died in 1977 in New Rochelle, New York, after a successful professorial career at Fordham University in New York.

During his long and active intellectual life, von Hildebrand tackled many subjects and worked across many disciplines. But as a young man, during the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, he responded with particular vigor to the growing threat that rising nationalism posed both to European reconciliation and unity as well as to Catholic supranationalism. In this, he drew inspiration from the Catholic peace movement. This article means

to explore Hildebrand’s efforts, intellectual and social, to oppose the rise of nationalism and to expose its ideological nature.

The post-war Catholic peace movement identified nationalism as the fundamental obstacle to European peace and unity. It was seen as the radical, ideological identification of the individual with his nation. Juxtaposed with this newfangled identification was a “natural”, healthy form of identification traditionally termed “patriotism”.

Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977).

Photograph courtesy of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project.

Nationalism was also seen as a challenge and contradiction to Catholic universalism. As a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Munich and of the Deutsche Katholische Akademikerverband (the German Catholic Academics’ Association), von Hildebrand was alarmed at the influx of nationalist sentiments into the Catholic milieu. During the 1920s and into the 1930s Catholics began to identify with their nation first before understanding themselves as Catholics. A minority of intellectuals and politicians, above all Franz von Papen (1879-

1969), even began to “build bridges” between Catholicism and National Socialism.

Von Hildebrand’s earliest confrontation with postwar German nationalists took place in December 1921 at the first Democratic International Congress (the congress would be held annually between 1921 and 1931), an international peace congress of the Jeune Democratie in Paris. He had just begun his academic career as a lecturer at the University of Munich and already had a reputation as a “dedicated enemy of nationalism” who frequented the circles of the European Christian peace movement.

At the congress in Paris, von Hildebrand was to give a lecture at the invitation of the French Catholic intellectual Marc Sangnier (1873-1950), the head of the Jeune Democratie.

Sangnier had formerly led the Sillon movement, founded in 1894, which advocated the idea that “democracy is the type of social organization which tends to the highest development of conscience and of civic responsibility in the individual”. Moreover, Sangnier argued that “this organization (democracy) needs Christianity for its realization”. However, in 1910, during the modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, Sillon had been condemned and dissolved by Pope Pius X. Sangnier faithfully obeyed the order of the Pope and founded a successor organization, the Jeune Democratie, which, in contrast to Sillon, was independent of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.

In his memoirs, von Hildebrand described Sangnier as a “heroic fighter against nationalism” and praised the “supranational Catholic spirit” of both Sillon and the Jeune Democratie. Von Hildebrand clearly identified supranationality as a great Catholic good in and of itself as well as for Europe. During the Paris congress, the contrast between nationalism on the one hand and

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Catholic supranationalism on the other was further elaborated.

The congress was an even at which Catholics of different nationalities participated, united in their common supranational identity. In his lecture, von Hildebrand offered an analysis of nationalism in which he identified two dangers. On the one hand, nationalism endangered and was the antithesis to European unity and peace, and, on the other hand, drove a wedge into the ethos of Catholic universality as embodied in the universal community of the Catholic Church.

Von Hildebrand underlined the dichotomy between nationalism and universalism. Reconciliation and symbiosis was advocated by Catholics whose fervent desire for community and belonging blinded them to the irreconcilability between nationalist and the supranational ethos of the Catholic faith. In 1929, von Hildebrand spoke at an international meeting of the Pax Romana movement, an international movement for Catholic students that had been founded in Switzerland in 1921 and with which von Hildebrand maintained a lifelong relationship. In his address he boldly restated that “[o]ne cannot be a Catholic and a nationalist at the same time”. With these words he expressed his stern conviction that to be a Catholic meant to be a member of a universal community, the good and rights of which were superior to the good of the national community.

Nationalism, by contrast, “divinizes the nation and sets her good absolute”. Finally von Hildebrand likened nationalism to a religious creed and denounced it as the “greatest heresy of the time.” He continued to proclaim the essential dichotomy between nationalism and Catholicism throughout—and beyond—the interwar period.

But the cosmopolitan von Hildebrand did not advocate overcoming national identities. In his later memoirs, von Hildebrand speaks of his “special love for the cultural individuality (Eigenart) of nations” and how much he “enjoys

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experiencing the special atmosphere and national genius of a country.”

Von Hildebrand’s writings continually sought to strike a balance between the universal and the particular, between Catholic universality and supranational identity, on the one hand, and nationality and patriotism, on the other. He attempted to integrate these concepts in the idea of the person. His argument centered on the superior value and dignity of the individual person. Von Hildebrand explained that the human person had the ontological capacity and even the telos to be a part of a great variety of human communities.

The nation was simply one such community that, however, ranked on a plane lower than that of the equally natural, universal community of humanity.

In order to assess the dignity of a given community, von Hildebrand proposed consideration of its raison d’être in light of the human being as person. He developed a “metaphysics of community” and elaborated a metaphysical hierarchy amongst a variety of communities such as the Church, humanity, family, state, marriage and nation. To him, the one end—the unum necessarium, as he phrased it—for “man as person” (that is to say, as a self-conscious and self-possessive being) was salvation. Salvation was the telos of the person as well as the common end of all humanity.

It followed from this that a national community is inferior to humanity because its end does not match the sovereign end of the human person as person.

Therefore, the end of the national community—that is to say, the good and well-being of the nation—is of a lesser value. Nationalism, therefore, is a distortion of the proper order of communities since it aggrandizes the nation and thus confuses its proper place in the communal order.

Again, it is important to note that von Hildebrand loved national diversity and endorsed the nation as a genuine community and one’s national identity or belonging to that community.

In addition to his public lectures, von Hildebrand sought additional avenues to foster what could be termed a “transnational unity” and Catholic supranationalism. In 1921 von Hildebrand became head of the Academics’ Association’s Auslandskommission (foreign commission), which had been created with the explicit desire “to nourish the awareness of unity and community amongst Catholics from different countries”—a unity and community that lay precisely “above and beyond the divisions of national boundaries”.

Von Hildebrand could not have given more unambiguous expression to the commission’s thoroughly ‘transnational’ objective: to overcome national divisions for the sake of transnational solidarity and community. In other words, this organization cultivated cross-border communication and exchange for the specific purpose of constructing and solidifying a transnational European community of academics and intellectuals.

The Auslandskommission steered clear of advocating any specific international or national political order. Consistent with the apolitical character of the Akademikerverband, the Auslandskommission was formed to promote unity and peace by forging cultural and religious ties among individuals from different nations.

Von Hildebrand coined the character of the Auslandskommission and lived its mission. Under his leadership, the Auslandskommission was to form the institutional foundation on which individual efforts and relationships could successfully unfold. To that end, he encouraged close and likeminded friends and acquaintances, all of whom were members of the Akademikerverband and could boast an array of foreign contacts, to serve on its board.

The twelve members included linguists, cultural historians, philosophers, and theologians, including the entrepreneur and nobleman Theodor Freiherr von Cramer-Klett (1874-1938); Franz

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Xaver Münch (1883-1940), papal prelate since 1926; and the wellknown linguist, philosopher of culture, and French connoisseur Hermann Platz (1880-1945).

In order to nourish the sense of unity and friendship among Catholics the commission stimulated greater mutual understanding and appreciation for “spiritual and religious particularities”. It funded visits by foreign Catholic scholars to Germany who would speak on their countries’ traditions and identity. These lectures and frequent publications also invited Catholic scholars to reflect on their common Catholic intellectual tradition and European heritage.

One of these lectures encouraged the founding of the German-American Friendship Committee. At the invitation of the Auslandskommission, ‘Germanophile’ George Nauman Shuster (18941977) delivered a ‘well-received’ lecture with the title “American Idealism Today” in December 1930.

Dietrich von Hildebrand headed the German side of the GermanAmerican Friendship Committee.

Shuster was a lecturer of English at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn and managing editor of the ‘progressive’ independent Catholic journal, Commonweal.

In 1940 Shuster was appointed president of Hunter College, an allwomen’s college in New York, and in 1950/1951 took a leave from the college to become governor of Bavaria during the Allied occupation of Germany.

Hildebrand’s counterpart as head of the subcommittee on the American side was the renowned Columbia University professor Carlton J. H. Hayes (1882-1964).

Hayes and Shuster knew each other from their participation in Commonweal. Hayes was recognized as one of the most important American historians of his time, especially for his “pioneering work on nationalism”, which Hayes also called a ‘heresy’.

There were many other initiatives made to forge relationships and create a network of transnational

Catholic intellectuals. But von Hildebrand also pursued transnational solidarity in his private life—as private, professional and institutional distinctions became blurred for his cause. By way of receiving foreign intellectuals “in a spirit of community and love”, they would be introduced to “the real Germany”.

In the fall of 1930 “had offered his house in Munich as a home to foreign Catholic intellectuals.”

The bi-weekly religious evenings, an informal forum at which

Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes (1882–1964) was an American educator and European historian.

He served as U.S. ambassador to Spain during World War II. Photograph courtesy of the American Historical Association.

religious intellectual problems were discussed, were an especially appropriate occasion to introduce the visitors to German Catholic intellectual life. Von Hildebrand had already moved the office of the Auslandskommission into his private home in Munich, where the founding meeting of the GermanAmerican Friendship Committee took place. Von Hildebrand hosted private events for international students and by the early 1930s his house had become a meeting place for the community of international students at the University of Munich; his advent and costume parties were on occasion attended by people from more than twenty different nationalities.

To von Hildebrand and the leadership of the Akademikerverband, the hope for a reunited, and thus peaceful, Europe rested solely in the specifically universal ethos of the Catholic faith. The only remedy for nationalist disunity was a unity founded on the Catholic universal ethos. But this interpretation amounted to a program for fundamental spiritual and cultural renewal.

Indeed, for von Hildebrand and the Akademikerverband, only the Catholic religion was considered to have the spiritual energy and the universal outlook to inspire and rebuild Europe. To that end, and in order to spread the universal, “catholic” worldview, the Akademikerverband published extensively in Germany and abroad.

Its flagship journal was fittingly titled Der katholische Gedanke (The Catholic Thought).

In his personal and professional life, von Hildebrand continually aspired to create a transnational Catholic intellectual network—what might also be called a “transnational religious community” of intellectuals. His early efforts were both a response to the growing nationalization of Catholic identity and to the challenge of nationalism posed during the interwar period.

He heroically continued this struggle against National Socialism and communism after his emigration to Austria, where he published the weekly Der Christliche Ständestaat (The Christian Corporative State), a paper exclusively designed to oppose the totalitarian ideologies of Hitler and Stalin.

Hildebrand serves as a fitting example of an intellectual who recognized and loved the common cultural and religious heritage of Europe and who arduously sought to integrate that unity and the particular histories of Europe’s nationalities.

Mr. Kitzinger, a native of Germany, is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is also a Fellow at Thomas More College in the U.S.

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Local Autonomy, Nation-States & the EU Robert Nef We have heard many opinions about the likely future of the European Union. But I’d like to share with you some insights from the Swiss perspective. Swiss entry into the European Economic Area was rejected on 6 December 1992 by a narrow majority of the people and a solid majority of the cantons.

Current polls show a majority of over 70% against joining the EU. However, our government and the central bureaucracy are still in favour of joining, and have been following a step-by-step strategy of integration by fait accompli—agreeing to certain temporary arrangements and then merely formalizing them using the argument that they have been effective for quite some time anyway.

It is in fact impossible to stay completely outside the whole integration process. The EU is in the middle of a crisis today and it would seem easy for a speaker from a non-member country to give the EU a good bashing and paint a bleak picture of its future. However, matters are quite serious now and this is not the time to make jokes or engage in Schadenfreude, of course.

The EU in general and the Euro in particular do have some serious structural flaws. But the main message to keep in mind is that no institution has ever been perfect.

The EU is not a fixed condition but an ambitious—maybe too ambitious—project and a piece of unfinished business. Therein lie its challenges and opportunities. But there is no reason for panic. Every human project is confronted with challenges from time to time.

Some of my American and British friends predict that “the party is over” and some of my German friends have offered visionary predictions that das knallt alles an die Wand—which means, “it will all come crashing down.” That a classical liberal Europe will then rise from the ashes like a phoenix—

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this I rather doubt. As classical liberals, we must do all we can to keep Europe diverse, ready to learn, open within the international context, and capable of adapting. I may be concerned about the future of the EU, but I know that it is not possible to simply turn back the clock.

All friends of liberty—all classical liberals and libertarians— are called to first seek out the liberal core of the European idea and then to defend it tenaciously against all undesirable developments leading to a more central bureaucracy.

I am convinced that Europe today needs more than short-term political crisis management. The flight forward into centralized economic, financial, and social policies will not solve the current problems. What is required is a reconsideration of the conditions and facts that form the secret of our little continent’s success in world history.

It is Europe’s diversity that has enabled competition in the broadest sense and mutual learning—that diversity which tenaciously resists the spirit of standardization and harmonization.

Let’s turn to the idea of regional integration as a transnational alternative to the nation-state. The terms “region” and “integration” are not easy to define; they are sneaky words. The word “region” harkens back to the rex, the king.

“Integration,” on the other hand, has the double meaning of either eliminating differences or of cultivating differences.

Personally, I am in favour of cultivating diversity. That is, after all, one of the great secrets of Swiss success. European diversity includes the individual responsibility of EU member states for their own budgets, which requires a consistent no-bail-out policy that expects each member to take responsibility for its own financing and to bear the consequences of national bankruptcy. This combination of diversity and autonomy is what the

economist and historian Eric Jones called “the European Miracle”: “The fundamental trump card of Europe is its diversity.”

This is not only the diversity of nations but, above all, the internal diversity within a nation-state. In the past, this internal diversity used to be considered a disadvantage; but in a competitive world of learning societies, it is effectively turning into an advantage. At least that is the experience we have had in Switzerland. Diversity makes us all the more robust and less vulnerable.

It enables mutual transfers of knowledge; one simply copies the successes and avoids the mistakes.

This is, in fact, a form of experimentation. History does not offer us complete, readymade models that we can simply replicate. But it does show us a lot of interesting experiments. I, for example, never call Switzerland a “model.” It cannot be copied. But it is, at least partly, a successful experiment.

The whole of life is an experiment. Technology can be regarded as Nature experimenting with humans. And in this light, politics is nothing but humans experimenting with humans. It is true that experimental economists are becoming increasingly famous these days; but their experiments are always designed from above.

The political experimentation I am talking about is different. There is no central designer but rather, small groups experimenting with what works and what does not work.

Indeed, the smaller the group experimenting, the better the results because the risks of failure are contained within a small area or limited to a small group of people.

Human diversity over a geographic area naturally results in small groups suitable for experimentation. Take the city of Prague, for example.

The history of this beautiful city is one of competing and overlapping minorities (in a similar fashion as they currently exist in Switzerland).

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If Prague were completely homogenously populated, it would be difficult to define a specific group or area that could work out answers to collective questions—to experiment with adaptation.

Historically, the most decisive cultural and political unit is the city (with its suburbs), not the centralized nation state. Political institutions of the future will simply be confederations of cities and local communities. And for Europe, I suggest that an actual path forward has nothing to do with forgetting about regional integration and going back to “the good old nation-state.”

Switzerland has never been a typical nation-state and this is another of the many secrets of our successes.

Some time ago, I tried to put together a list of these secrets. While some of them are unfortunately now in decline, they include: diversity of languages, religions, and cultures; overlapping minorities (who do not like each other very much, but who, at the same time, don’t hate each other—in other words, overlapping and asymmetric sympathies and antipathies); an absence of “natural borders” and, instead, historicallydependent and irrational borders, both internally and externally, which make cross-border cooperation a good idea; old but functioning noncentral administrative structures; relatively free labor markets; small and flexible urban centers with a high group ethos, as well as flexible and educated elites who pursue relatively simple lifestyles.

In contrast to these Swiss qualities, most nation-states that exist today are the result of very cruel experiments of unification and discrimination—even extinction— of minorities. According to Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), the nation-states are steeped in Blut und Eisen. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 BC) may have been right, after all, when he claimed that “war is the father of all things.”

The traditional nationstate wanted to safeguard and imperialistically promote the ideas of state, nation, language, economy,

and culture within one “sensibly” and “naturally” constrained territory.

But who is to say what the “correct” political borders are? This collective conceptual error led to the First World War—which, according to George Kennan, was “the great seminal catastrophe of the 20th century, the event which lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this Western civilization.” It is an event in whose shadows we are still suffering. (Of course, the Second World War was just a continuation of the First, and the Cold War was just a continuation of the Second.)

The disastrous issue was the vain hope to find “just” borders. But there are no “just” borders. Borders are just borders!

Today, economies and cultures are increasingly spanning political and linguistic borders. But the EU is not the positive alternative to the collective error of centralized nation-states. Instead, the EU is a bureaucratic, corporatist empire, a political cartel in which the economically influential parties keep the smaller or economically weaker parties happy through transfer payments. In return, they demand financial and political tributes while, at the same time, cutting off competition among systems as much as possible. The more ambiguous and indistinctive the foundations of this system are, the better for the self-assigned, self-empowering Eurocrats in Brussels. They can live quite well in this state of hazily defined responsibilities since bureaucrats are masters at muddling through things.

In terms of its origins and structures, the EU is an ambitious attempt to overcome the crises of the nationally structured, social democratic industrial age at a supranational or continental level. In reality, however, it has created a mechanism which takes problems that are no longer solvable in generally binding, democratically legitimate, national legislation and pushes them up to the European level. (Examples of this include monetary policy or the ticking time bomb of collective pension schemes.)

Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present by Brendan Simms (Basic Books, 2013): In this book, the precocious Simms seeks to use historical evidence to demonstrate that the world is better off when European nations work together and think in continental terms. Though not an apology for the EU bureaucracy, the book is a forceful defense of the idea of Europe as it was conceived by statesmen and political leaders centuries ago. Simms begins his story with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, which left Europe open to Ottoman invasions, and takes the reader through centuries of military and strategic considerations, and the inter-mingling of different cultures, languages, and people—all of which have resulted in shaping the European civilization we know today.

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Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher by Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013): In this book, Harris offers one of the most lucid and beautifully written biographies of Lady Thatcher. Harris worked for the Tory Party’s Conservative Research Department before serving as an adviser and trusted speechwriter to Thatcher.

He also assisted her with her autobiography after she was out of office. Drawing on these experiences, Harris has wonderful insights into her character and charming anecdotes. His tribute to Thatcher is at once informative, educational, and revealing—for, like Reagan, Thatcher was intellectually convinced of the rightness of her cause and inspired by a particular vision of the world.

She was totally committed to engaging in a battle of ideas that she saw as crucial for the survival of the West. This is an essential work about a person who truly made history.

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The EU is trying to artificially keep alive a welfare state from the industrial era—whose very economic foundations have become untenable in this age of globalization. It is an outdated project that is stuck in the conservative mentality of mercantilism—a mindset focused on the market economy tamed or perhaps shackled by corporatism, and on a welfare state that deprives people the right to decide. Unsuited to the challenges of the 21st century, it obsesses about internal markets instead of global free trade.

The EU is trying to prolong this collective error at the continental level by imposing a form of European pseudosolidarity and nationality. It wants to be something of a mercantilist super-nation. If it lacks loyalty, it buys people off through centrally organized redistribution. But in reality, it is perhaps destroying loyalties more than creating them.

Coercion destroys voluntary action and genuine loyalty. Loyalty can only be based on free consensus and enlightened self-interest, never on the bureaucratic machinery of redistribution.

Most nation-states are probably too large, rather than too small.

Their current size came about as an optimal defensive response in case of war. In other words, large states did not rise through markets but through wars. However, this emphasis on size for military purposes has become somewhat moot in our nuclear age.

There are political communities which collect money for the common good on the basis of self-administered taxes (something akin to club membership fees).

Whenever possible, they charge directly for the use of public goods. These arrangements seem to work. Our goal then is not the removal of all borders and the full integration of everybody in centralizing structures but a political organization which offers the best possible combination of “voting”, “voting with your feet” (departure or exit) and “loyalty.”

The dictum “no taxation without representation” is well known, but sometimes its equally important opposite is forgotten: “no representation without taxation.”

The “natural” political organization is a group of people who agree to be taxed by consent. This group may be very small, perhaps even smaller than Switzerland! But small is beautiful and there is no reason to fight against your neighbors— provided, of course, that they don’t try to change your tax system.

My vision for Europe would entail a new form of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

But this would be different from the actual EFTA which has not exactly been successful and, in fact, which is a slave to the association agreements signed under pressure of the then European Economic Community. (To this day, EFTA still labors under the somewhat outdated ideas of 1989). Instead, there would be a New European Free Trade Association to be governed by peaceful, independent states with differing political structures. It would be open to the world and to free trade. There would be competition of fiscal and social policies among geographically small areas, which could also assert their immigration policies based on their interests—and which would also pay attention to the interests of immigrants.

Such arrangements and conditions could not possibly lead to the creation of a federal European super-state. I hope that the members of the EU have enough sense to see the way forward. There is still a lot that can be done.

Mr. Nef is chairman of the board of trustees of the Liberales Institut, an independent think-tank in Geneva and Zürich, which works to advance the Swiss tradition of individual liberty, openness, peace, and political diversity. Mr. Nef edits the quarterly journal, Reflexionen, and from 19942008 was associate editor of the monthly bilingual journal, Schweizer Monatshefte.

He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and president of the Foundation for Ethics and Occidental Culture.

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Lady Thatcher (1925-2013)

André P. DeBattista

The news of the death of Margaret Thatcher provoked diverse reactions. Many world leaders, political figures, and private individuals paid tribute to one of the greatest peace-time leaders— and an indomitable fighter for the principles of economic and political liberty.

To her admirers she was the woman who restored a sense of dignity and pride to the United Kingdom—which was then a demoralized nation plagued by unsustainable state-owned industries, and an inflexible and highly partisan trade union movement. To her detractors she was a reprehensible figure whose policies led to high unemployment, inner-city riots, and the destruction of the welfare state.

Such mixed reactions have always been synonymous with the form of conviction politics that Lady Thatcher cultivated. Very few were indifferent or neutral to her style or her ideas.

Both friend and foe have to admit that she was a political giant.

She was the first woman elected to lead a western democracy and during her eleven-year premiership she shook the political establishment to the core, seeking to dismantle certain accepted truths of the day. In short, her influence on politics, economics, and international relations was unparalleled.

A Brief Biographical Portrait Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in the town of Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Her father, Alfred Roberts, owned two grocery stores and was a lay preacher in the local Methodist church. He was Mayor of Grantham between 1945 and 1946, and served as an alderman until 1952. Margaret Thatcher often credited her father for instilling in her civic pride, sense of duty, and a love of hard work.

She won a scholarship to read for a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford.

She later studied law and qualified as a barrister with a specialization in taxation. In 1946 she was elected president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduation, she unsuccessfully ran in the 1950 and 1951 elections in the safe Labour constituency of Dartford. In 1951, she married Denis Thatcher and had two children.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG OM PC FRS Lady Thatcher’s first successful step into the political arena was when she was selected as a Conservative candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley and was elected MP in 1959. Later, between 1970 and 1974, she served as Secretary of State for Education.

In 1975, Lady Thatcher challenged the incumbent Conservative leader Edward Heath for the leadership. She defeated him in the first ballot and went on to win the leadership contest, going on to serve as Leader of the Opposition between 1975 and 1979.

The Conservative Party won the 1979 election and Lady

Thatcher went on to lead the party through three consecutive victories. Influenced by free-market advisors, her administrations pursued monetarist financial policies.

The Conservative Government demanded more accountability from the powerful trade unions, reduced taxation, introduced a highly-successful program of privatization, and forcefully defended British interests abroad.

Her leadership was finally challenged in 1990 and she subsequently resigned the premiership but stayed on as a backbencher until 1992. She was elevated to the peerage in 1992 as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire.

Thatcherite Conservatism Understanding Lady Thatcher’s brand of conservative philosophy is a difficult task. Its intellectual roots lie in the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and John Locke. Politically, she acknowledged the influence of Enoch Powell (although both individuals disagreed over the Anglo-American relationship) and Keith Joseph (an ideological giant in his own right), and expressed a deep admiration for Friedrich Hayek.

Her economic vision was built fundamentally on the belief that the free market has a superior ability to address social and economic concerns. Together with the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs, she pursued economic policies based on free trade, fiscal discipline, limited public expenditure, tax cuts, and privatization.

She challenged the post-war economic consensus based on the Keynesian principle of tax-andspend. These policies, although useful in the immediate postwar scenario, were ineffective by the 1970s. Spiraling debt, inflation, and undemocratic trade unionism turned Britain into an ungovernable mess.

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Her administration sought to tackle inflation and make the British labour market more competitive.

These ideas were principle leitmotifs of Thatcherism. And in her eleven years Thatcher managed to get Britain out of the quagmire it had been in and reverse its slow but steady decline.

Her economic policies were built on an ideological conviction that the right to private ownership is a fundamental component for freedom to flourish. She believed everyone should have the right to own property. And this idea of popular capitalism—the belief that everyone in a society should have the opportunity to own a stake in an enterprise and property— eventually became associated with Thatcherism.

There were many examples of this. Her government introduced a policy which allowed council house owners to buy their own property, thereby allowing millions of families to become property owners.

In addition, her government embarked on a wide programme of privatization. She believed that governments should not own businesses since the private sector was much more adept at running profitable enterprises.

But in her economic views, she was fundamentally motivated by the belief that private ownership is the most effective means to diminish the power of government over people. Privatization gave employees a stake in their business and turned debt-ridden stateowned industries into profitable firms and created communities of stake-holders.

With regard to international affairs, Lady Thatcher viewed the nation-state and its interests as the central consideration in all foreign policy considerations. She seemed to have been correct in making this assessment as history has proven that, despite its limitations, the nation-state continues to remain the principal actor in international relations.

Her detractors accused Lady Thatcher of being a “little

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Englander.” But her world-view was anything but insular or provincial.

Immediately after her election as Conservative Party leader, Thatcher began attacking the policy of détente. She viewed it as a form of appeasement and an attempt by Communist governments to lull the West into a false sense of security while simultaneously developing their weapon capabilities.

In response to the Soviet threat, she provided a political and ideological opposition to Communism and insisted that the freedom based on a sound democracy and the rule of law should not be limited to a select few countries.

Eventually she managed to change the face of Europe. Her contribution toward the dismantling of the Iron Curtain saw the emergence of new democracies which now form part of the democratic family of nations. Many of them would later acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to the Thatcher revolution.

It must be said that she was fortunate to have as her contemporaries other leaders who shared her vision. President Ronald Reagan proved to be a great political ally and Pope John Paul II provided sound moral leadership, especially in her struggle against Soviet Communism. And when she finally left office, Communism was in its death throes.

Her European Legacy Lady Thatcher’s antagonism toward Europe was probably one of two main factors which led to her downfall. The relationship of the Thatcher Administration to the European Community is well documented.

In her 1988 speech to the College of Europe—known as the “Bruges Speech”—Mrs Thatcher said: “The Community is not an end in itself. Nor is it an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept. Nor must it be ossified by endless regulation.

The European Community is a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in which there are many other powerful nations and groups of nations.”

A European Union which served itself rather than its citizens was something she could not accept. Although some say she exhibited unnecessary belligerence, Lady Thatcher’s demands for a more accountable, more democratic, and more transparent community were well justified. And in the many years since her 1988 speech, Europeans have seen the excesses of the EU project.

Lady Thatcher was undoubtedly a great political leader and a visionary. She gave a strong political voice to what was previously a minority fringe intellectual movement on the centre-right of British politics.

As with most people who embark on a life of public service and dare to think creatively and innovatively, her policies were not always popular. Nor did they always yield the results she desired. Nonetheless, she brought a sense of conviction and moral clarity that were lacking. Her determination to pursue economic and political freedom against all odds is something that remains unforgettable—and which has inspired and continues to inspire people around the world. Thus, we can all be considered heirs to her legacy of freedom.

Lady Thatcher challenged the collectivist mind-set in the UK and abroad, and sought to speak for what was morally correct rather than what was popular.

We are all fortunate to have her example. An attitude like hers—and a bold courage like hers—is sorely needed in a world which is now pre-occupied with political polls, surveys, and public relations.

Mr. DeBattista is an international relations analyst based on the Island of Malta.

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Loss & Gain—or the Fate of the Book Anthony Daniels Finding myself for three or four months at a loose end on the island of Jersey, a tax haven in the English Channel, I decided to go into the archives and write a short book about three murders that took place there in as many months between December 1845 and February 1846, including that of the only policemen ever to have been done to death on the island, George Le Cronier. He was stabbed by the keeper of a brothel known as Mulberry Cottage, Madame Le Gendre, who, a true professional, struck upwards rather than downwards with her specially sharpened knife, exclaiming expressively as she did so, “Là!” Le Cronier staggered outside and said to his fellow policeman, HenriManuel Luce, “Oh mon garçon, je suis stabbé !” (the language of most people of the natives of the island at that time being a patois). He died a day later, and Madame Le Gendre was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for life, outraging the righteous residents of Jersey with the elegance of her dress as she left the island, never to return.

Among the books I consulted in my researches in the library of the Société Jersiaise was La lyre exilée, a book of poems published in 1847 by a French exile to the island, L. D. Hurel. All that I was able to find out about him (Hurel was a pseudonym) was that he arrived several years before the most famous French exile to Jersey, Victor Hugo; the reasons for his exile are unknown.

La lyre exilée contained a funeral ode to Le Cronier, as well as an ode to the abolition of the death penalty.

Hurel published the former ode separately just after the murder, when feelings ran high on the island; according to the author, it sold out in two editions of two thousand copies each, which means that one in twelve of the population bought it.

Having left the island, and now writing the book, I discovered that my notes from La lyre exilée were incomplete and I needed to consult it again. Where could I go to do so? Books don’t come

much more obscure: there were only twelve copies known in the world. (It is what the sellers of antiquarian books call very scarce, without ever letting on that people who are interested in it are scarcer still.) To return to Jersey was out of the question; then I discovered to my surprise, and initial pleasure, that the book had been digitized. I could consult it without leaving my study, without even shifting in my chair. I was briefly reconciled with and to the modern world.

Soon, however, my pleasure gave way to a melancholy, an unease, and even a slight bitterness. If a book as obscure as La lyre exilée were available online, did it not herald the extinction of the book itself, an article rendered

redundant like the goose quills of old or fine sand to dry ink on paper?

If so, why should such an eventuality cause me to grieve? After all, I had felt no particular sorrow at the disappearance of the typewriter.

(A film with a scene in a typing pool now strikes us as irresistibly comic, as if all those typists were simpletons or country bumpkins.) Nevertheless, I grew uneasy, like a man who had spent all his life on arcane alchemical studies only to realize towards the end, when it is too late to take up anything else, that scientific chemistry had rendered all his endeavors nugatory: that he had, in fact, devoted his earthly existence to the search for a chimera and frittered his time away on a child’s illusion.

For books, whose disappearance the digitization of La lyre exileé seemed to presage, have played an immense part in my life. It would be vain to suggest that I valued them only for

their content, as a rationalist might say that one ought; I valued them as physical objects and have accumulated thousands of them. I am not a bibliophile in the true sense, that is to say someone who finds excitement in a misprint on page 278 which proves that the book, which he might or might not ever read, is a true first edition.

Nor am I a bibliomaniac in the true sense, the kind of person who will eventually be found lying dead under a pile of books that he has incontinently or indiscriminately collected because of some psychological compulsion to accumulate. No, I am something in between the two (as a physician put it when I was a student, as he tried to explain to a patient that he had myeloma, which was neither cancer nor leukaemia, “but something in between the two.”) I prefer a good edition, physically as well as literarily speaking, to a bad one; I buy more books than I read, though always with the intention of reading them; I am not an aficionado of rarity for rarity’s sake, though I have some rare things, upon which the eye of the avaricious bookseller called in by my relict will immediately alight as he offers her yardage, $5 a yard of books.

For the moment, however, I derive a certain comfort from looking over, and being surrounded by, my laden shelves. They are my refuge from a world that I have found difficult to negotiate; if it had not been for the necessity of earning my living in a more practical way, I could easily, and perhaps happily, have turned into a complete bookworm, or one of those creatures like the silverfish and the small, fragile, scaly moths that spend their entire lives among obscure and seldom disturbed volumes. I would have not read to live, but lived to read.

The shelves are an elaborate hieroglyph of my life that only I can read, and that will be destroyed after my death. Never having been a scholar of anything in particular, my life has been a succession of obsessions; as some murderers return to their crimes and become serial killers, I am a man of serial monomanias, each lasting a

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The old Waterfield’s Bookstore, formerly located at 52 High Street in Oxford (UK). Sadly, this bookstore closed about four years ago. Photograph courtesy of Bet Mercer at GimmeSomeReads.

few months at most, and my books reflect this. A friend of mine, looking over them, said that anyone trying to discern from my books who I was or what I did would fail; for what has the history of Haiti to do with poisoning by arsenic, or the history of thought in nineteenth-century Russia with that of premature burial, plague, cholera, and the anti-vaccination agitation?

Surprising numbers of books on all these matters are to be found on my shelves; and if I needed any reassurance of my own individuality, as the increasing number of people having themselves tattooed or pierced seemingly do, these shelves would supply it.

So important are books to me that when I go into someone’s house, I find myself drawn to the bookshelves, if any; I try to resist, but in the end succumb to the temptation. If all flesh is grass, all mind is books: at any rate, such is my prejudice, though I know it is not strictly true. What is absent from the shelves is as important, of course, as the silence of the dog that did not bark in the night. My library, for the moment so solid and reliable, will dissolve after my death as surely as will my body. Some people claim that the knowledge that the atoms and molecules of which they are composed will survive to be absorbed

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into the wider world consoles them for the prospect of their death; and I, too, derived, until recently, some consolation from the fact that I am not really the owner of my books, but only the temporary guardian of them until they are passed on to the guardianship of someone else. It is true that when, in earlier years, I bought a book a quarter of a millennium old I looked at the names of the previous owners inscribed on its cover or title page and thought, “Now, at last, the book has found its true owner, its final resting place—me,” and pitied the previous owners for their failure to understand this, and for their ignorance of the book’s final destiny. But now I am more inclined to recall that I have owned the book for thirty years; in another thirty years it will be owned, or looked after, by someone else of whose identity I know nothing, and he will suffer from precisely my delusion and that of all previous owners. (Not that this prevents me from acquiring yet more books; and the Rev. Thomas Dibdin, author of Bibliomania: The Causes and Cure of this Fatal Disease, describes how a bibliomaniac who was already possessed of 50,000 books sent out for more volumes from a bookseller’s catalogue on his very deathbed, indeed at the very hour of his death. Was his death a happy or a sad one? Do

we envy him his continued passion or smile at his sorry delusion? At any rate, his library was sold immediately afterwards at auction for far less than he had paid for it. Bibliomania, incidentally, underwent what was probably the largest and fastest expansion between first and second editions in the history of publishing; appearing first in 1807, it was 94 pages long; by the second edition, two years later, it had expanded to 786 pages, the expansion in itself a metonym for the bibliomaniac’s problem. A century and a quarter later, Holbrook Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania, a wonderful and astonishingly erudite compendium of booklore, composed on the model of Burton’s Anatomy, was even longer. Also incidentally, bibliomania is another section in my library, a kind of metalibrary, if you will.)

But the consolation that my library will dissolve into its constituent parts in the great world of second-hand books is not as great as it was even a few years ago. Second-hand booksellers are closing their shops and transferring their businesses online because 90% of their sales come from the Internet and 90% of their overheads come from their shops. It is a very simple business decision.

A bookseller, from whom I had been buying for nearly forty years, and with whom I had grown old, told me, shortly before he closed down his shop, that the nature of customers had changed over the years. True browsers like me, who were content to spend two or three hours among the dust to find something of whose existence they previously had had no inkling, but which, by a process of elective affinity, aroused their interest and even sparked a passion, were few and were old. In so far as young people came into his shop at all, they came to enquire whether he had such and such a book, usually required reading for some course or other; and if he had not, they left immediately, having no further interest in his stock. Their need for the book in question must have been urgent, since it was available online for delivery next day; they must have been late with an assignment. So if youth were the future, the future, at least for second-hand booksellers with

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shops, was bleak.

This was a genuine cultural change, my bookseller said, and not just the complaint of a man who had grown old without seeing the time pass. When he started out in the trade, young people browsed in the way that only the old now did; and so he had been overtaken by a change that owed nothing to him, as wheelwrights, coopers, or blacksmiths had once been overtaken.

So who will take my books after my death? Into what wider world will they be absorbed?

Other booksellers have told me stories that I did not find reassuring— though booksellers say of each other’s stories that they are unreliable, for as a profession they are like anglers, with tales of Gutenbergs and Caxtons and Elzevirs and Vesaliuses and First Folios that got away (book-buyers are no different, of course, and I too have my stories of books that I almost bought but for some reason failed to do so).

These stories were of the wholesale abandonment or destruction of rare and valuable books by public institutions, even of those books willed by individuals to those public institutions. It was not as if librarians were merely ambivalent or negligent of the books in their charge, but as if they actually hated them, as workers in chocolate factories come to hate chocolate. One bookseller in Wales told me that he found seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books dumped in a skip outside a supposed institution of learning. Another found the librarians of a county library walking over the sixteenth-century books that they had pulled from the shelves preparatory to throwing them away in order to make space for more computer terminals.

The process is called deacquisitioning, a truly Orwellian term, as if demolition or bombing were called debuilding; and one of the justifications for the process is that records show that the deacquisitioned items have not been consulted for years, for decades. A library is no longer a repository of all that has been thought or written but a department store where the readers determine by their borrowing habits what stock should be held. If they want Dan Brown rather than the Summa

Theologica, then that is what libraries should carry. The customer is king.

Another justification for deacquisitioning is the need for space, not only for computer terminals, but also for books themselves. Despite lamentations over the decline in reading as a habit among the young, more books than ever continue to be published in every conceivable field. A library containing every book published in Great Britain in just a single year would now be larger than the largest library in the world a few centuries ago; except for institutions such as the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale, very severe and even ruthless selection is obviously necessary. But I do not think this fully explains the ancient books in the skip, which after all could have been sold, any more than the need for living space explains the mania for the demolition of old buildings.

Be all this as it may, it is indisputable that the half-millennial hegemony of the printed page in intellectual life is now coming to an end. Newspaper circulations, for example, are in precipitous decline everywhere in the developed world; in so far as they survive it is because those who grew up reading them still like the physical object between their hands. Nothing is so weak as the force of habit when the habits of succeeding generations change.

Repeated surveys show that children spend less time reading than did previous generations. They instead devote many hours of their waking lives to electronic screens of one kind or another: not long ago some American researchers presented their results at a conference I attended that showed that American children now spend seven hours a day, on average, in front of a screen, whether it be television, computer, or telephone.

They asked children at randomly generated times to use the video facility of their phones to film what they were doing at the time; and this showed that many of the children had several screens around them illuminated at the same time. Would this minestrone of simultaneous electronic stimulation permanently affect their ability or willingness to concentrate on one thing,

to the detriment of real intellectual attainment? The researchers did not know the answer to this; certainly, those who spent more time in front of screens did worse academically, though whether this was cause or effect they were unable to say. A child who spends sixteen hours in front of screens is unlikely to differ from a child who spends only an hour in front of them only in this respect.

People of the book, such as I, not only believe that the replacement of the page by the screen will alter human character, thin it out, empty it of depth, but secretly hope this happens.

A deterioration in human character consequent upon the demise of the book will be, for the inveterate reader, an apologia pro vita sua. For we who have spent so much of our lives with, and even for books secretly derived a sense of moral superiority from having done so. This is obvious from the fact that no one says “Young people nowadays do not read” in a tone other than of lament or, more usually, moral condemnation. A person who does not read—and for us reading means books—is a mental barbarian, a man who, wittingly or unwittingly, confines himself to his own experience, necessarily an infinitesimal proportion of all possible experiences. He is not only a barbarian, but an egotist.

We who pride ourselves in reading much and widely forget that the printed page serves us in a similar fashion as the drug serves an addict. After a short time away from it we grow agitated and begin to pine, by which time anything will do: a bus timetable, a telephone directory, an operating manual for a washing machine. “They say that life’s the thing,” said Logan Pearsall Smith, a littérateur of distinction but now almost forgotten, “but I prefer reading.” For how many of us—avid readers, that is—has the printed page been a means of avoidance of the sheer messiness, the intractability, of life, to no other purpose than the avoidance itself?

It is for us what the telenovela is for the inhabitant of the Latin American barrio, a distraction and a consolation.

We gorge on the printed page to distract ourselves from ourselves: the great business of Doctor Johnson’s life, according to Boswell and Johnson

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himself. Or we read to establish a sense of superiority, or at least to ward off a sense of inferiority: “What, you haven’t read Ulysses?”

Once, staying overnight at an airport hotel in Los Angeles, I found myself without a book. How this happened I can no longer recall; it was most unusual, for by far the most useful lesson that life has taught me, and one that I almost always heed, is never to go anywhere without a book.

(In Africa, I have found that reading a book is an excellent way of overcoming officials’ obstructionism. They obstruct in order to extract a bribe to remove the obstruction; but once they see you settled down for the long term, as it were, with a fat book, Moby Dick, say, they eventually recognize defeat.

Indeed, I owe it to African officialdom that I have read Moby Dick; I might otherwise never have got through it.)

Reduced in my Los Angeles room to a choice between television and the yellow pages—no doubt now also on the verge of extinction—I chose the yellow pages, and there discovered just how unusual my obsession with books was. I looked up bookstores, and found no more than half a page. Teethwhitening dentists, on the other hand, who promised a completely renewed existence to their clients, a confident smile being the secret of success, and success of happiness, took up more than twenty pages. Not poets, then, but teeth-whitening dentists, are now the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

An intellectual might be defined as someone who elaborates justifications for his own tastes and preferences, as metaphysics was once defined as the finding of bad reasons for what we all believe on instinct. And so the reader of books soon finds reasons for the supposed superiority of the printed page over the screen of the electronic device: for nothing stimulates the brain quite like the need for rationalization.

The dullest of minds, I have found, works at the speed of light when a rationalization is needed.

The page of a book is aesthetically pleasing as a screen is not: except that many pages of many books are not aesthetically pleasing. It is easier to retrace one’s steps in a book than on a

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screen: but only for those who are not as technologically adept as the young now are. It is easier to annotate a page of a book than a page of a screen: but the same objection applies. It is easier to concentrate long and seriously on a book than on a screen: but there is no intrinsic reason to the medium why this should be so, any more than there isp, ace the late Neil Postman, why television should be given over to vulgarity and trivia. We bibliophiles are reduced to finding bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

I asked one of my publishers (a man in a small way of business, as all my publishers are) whether he thought the book would survive. He, after all, was more interested in the question than most, and self-interest—among businessmen, not among academics— is a powerful stimulus to the search for truth. He said that he thought that it would, though such genres as pulp fiction and airport novels would soon be entirely digitized. Books of greater or exceptional content, or with high aesthetic value, would continue to be published. I immediately felt relieved, and told him that in these matters he was my guru: his prognostications assumed in my mind the status of fact. But he warned me against placing my faith in him, for most of his predictions had turned out to be exactly the opposite of what happened. “Then you shall be my urug, my mirror-image guru,” I said.

I saw at once that the concept of an urug was a useful one, for many are the experts in various fields— economics, for example—who are valuable as guides to reality, provided that you take them as urugs and not as gurus. The problem lies in deciding which is which.

Whether the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that it ought to survive, and nothing will convince me otherwise. The heart has its beliefs that evidence knows not of. For me, to browse in a bookshop, especially a second-hand one, will forever be superior to browsing on the internet precisely because chance plays a much larger part in it. There are few greater delights than entirely by chance to come across something not only fascinating in itself, but that establishes a quite unexpected connection with something

else. The imagination is stimulated in a way that the more logical connections of the Internet cannot match; the Internet will make people literalminded.

There are stages on a trade’s road to extinction, and the second-hand book trade is no exception. It is now overwhelmingly conducted online, and small towns of my acquaintance that used to have several such bookshops now have none. The métier of the book-searcher is no longer in existence, and the immense arcane knowledge that book-searchers once had is now quite useless. Instead there are sites that claim to have 100,000,000 volumes for sale, and this, of course, is an inestimable boon to those who need, or want, a certain book urgently. At the touch of a few keys, a book that once would have taken a lifetime to find will be delivered to your door tomorrow or the next day.

But every gain is also a loss. The pleasure of a book delivered in this fashion (though it exists, of course) is not as great, not as intense, as that of one found by chance, unexpectedly.

Perhaps there is a wider lesson here: you cannot have it all, you cannot reconcile all possible sources of pleasure. You cannot have the joys of serendipity and those of the convenience of immediate access to everything. Furthermore, it seems that you cannot choose between them as technology advances. To adapt Marx’s dictum about history slightly, Man makes his own pleasures, but not just as he pleases. To refuse to use the new technology in the hope of preserving old pleasures will not work because to do so would be no more authentic or honest than Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. The regret is genuine; the refusal is not.

Mr. Daniels is the author of The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism (2011) and Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (2010), among others. His most recent book is The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey Through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas published by Gibson Square Books. This article originally appeared in the November 2012 edition of The New Criterion. It is reprinted with permission.

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A Czech View of European Conservatism Roman Joch On behalf of the Občanský Institute, the local host for this year’s Vanenburg Meeting in Prague, I’d like to welcome participants—and share a few thoughts on the state of conservatism and classical liberalism in Europe today.

Conservatives in America have several advantages compared to those of us here in Europe. One advantage can be expressed by one word: “movement.” While there are conservative and classical liberal intellectuals here in Europe, as well as a handful of politicians in political parties, so far, there exists no organized political conservative or classical liberal movement. No wonder conservatives are less effective here than they are in America.

What are some of the reasons there is no European conservative movement? Two come to mind.

First, Europe may be one civilization—but it is not one nation. There are many nations in Europe speaking many languages.

Against this backdrop, the Left is often internationalist and globalist, while conservatives—or the Right, as I shall call them—is nationalist and localist. Those on the Left pay attention to events in foreign

A view of the Castle spires from one of the many side streets in Prague.

countries but few people on the Right do so. The Left sees itself as one monolithic, global, universal Left; and national left-wing movements are its only internal subdivisions.

On the other hand, the Right in Europe perceives itself mostly as a national Right, a Right in a particular nation, while right-wing movements in other nations are—well, in other nations. For many nationalist rightwingers, this means that they are not allies at all.

A view of Prague Castle from Charles Bridge.

(Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are in the public domain.)

In other words, many on the Right in Europe, since they are nationalists first and conservatives second, are less effective at building coalitions (and pan-European movements) than their leftist counterparts because of these self-imposed limitations.

Only when many on the European Right finally understand that their fight is primarily not in favor of one particular nation but in favor of their common, shared civilization, will conditions improve — and a European conservative movement may finally emerge.

Second, the Right in Europe is deeply divided on one issue—and that is the issue of the European integration. Most conservatives and classical liberals in Europe are against the EU, which they fear as a super-state. However, some other prominent conservatives and classical liberals have been strongly in favor of a European Federation—as it should be—both as an idea and as a goal.

Still others have been in favor of a unified Europe, though they have not necessarily been in favor of the incumbent EU as it is.

The most famous among the latter was surely the late Margaret Thatcher; the most exemplary among the former was perhaps the late

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Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who a coalition government of socialists served as a member of the European and communists, who decreed Parliament (and as co-founder, with nationalization. This was in the early Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove- 1980s of the 20th century, mind you!

Kalergi, of the Paneuropa Union).

But today, after the triumphs One cannot say that one of of Ronald Reagan and Margaret these was more or less conservative Thatcher, socialists have stopped than the other. Certainly nobody celebrating the alleged virtues of would argue that Baroness Thatcher state-run economies. Instead, they was insufficiently conservative; have embraced free markets as a more on the other hand, who was productive economic system and as a more conservative or more better way to create wealth. legitimately conservative in continental Europe than a Habsburg? The views of Baroness Thatcher and Archduke Otto on the EU were as different from each other as the views of John Randolph of Roanoke and Fisher Ames on the role of the US federal government two hundred years ago. Their views had been opposite, but that did not mean that either of them had not been conservatives.

Having addressed the reasons why a European conservative movement has not emerged yet, let me briefly explore causes of the comparative weakness of conservative and classical liberal thought in Europe.

Why are such ideas weaker in Europe than in America?

In my view, such weakness has been caused by two phenomena that are more prominent in Europe than in America: statism and secularism. The statist Lady Thatcher and Ronald Reagan standing together. mentality is far stronger in Photograph courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library .

Europe than in America; and, of course, Europe is more secular than America.

Of course, at the same time, One of the greatest victories of socialist politicians have conveniently the Right in the West has been the sought to tax and redistribute defeat of doctrinaire socialism at home wealth—in order to bribe their and Soviet Communism abroad. favorite voting-blocs and get elected.

Thirty years ago, European socialist So doctrinaire, dogmatic socialism parties advocated nationalization and may be dead, even in Europe—but state-ownership of industries, banks, the statist mentality is alive and well! mines, etc. That was the agenda of This statist mentality expresses the British Labour Party of Michael itself continually as a demand—and Foot and Tony Benn thirty years ago. expectation—on the part of people It was also part of the agenda under in Europe that it is a primary duty President François Mitterrand, during of government to take care of them,

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to provide them with wealth and well-being. Even many voters in Europe who consider themselves conservatives share that mentality.

It is no wonder European politics is more to the left than in America.

But perhaps the most important difference between Europe and America, something that is inimical to conservative and classical liberal thought in Europe, is European secularism. Europe, with some exceptions, is postChristian. And that’s the source of many European ills.

To be sure, individual non-believers can be very moral and ethical men. But they are moral and ethical in spite of their atheism not because of it. For what are the logical implications of a world-view that sees this biological life on Earth as the only life we have? What are the implications of the conviction that there is no after-life and that death is the absolute end of one’s existence?

Well, if this life is the only life we have or will ever have—which is to say, there is no God, no judgment and no eternal life after death— then the logical attitude towards this life is simply to live it as sweetly and comfortably as possible. The implications are hedonistic.

And what does this mean? Statism, for instance.

If the only reality we have is material, then let us have as much material wealth as possible. And this means socialism.

Why? Because the libertarian approach to wealth creation is full of hard work, efforts, toil and suffering.

On the other hand, the socialist way towards wealth is quite easy: It consists of voting and elections.

That’s why atheist socialists will always beat atheist libertarians in the struggle to attract more atheist voters.

And what about children? Of course, they are joy but a nuisance, as well. They cost time and money. With

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children being such a burden, why have children—especially if there is no God and no immortal soul?

Why, indeed? And that has been the conclusion of most of secular Europeans: They do not choose to have children. The results are, of course, clear: Europe’s population is aging and dying off, with secular Europeans not having enough babies (maybe one at most—as a domestic pet).

The reason for Europe’s demographic collapse cannot be material hardship or poverty. It is simply not true that Europeans cannot afford children, for contemporary Europeans are wealthy in a way that no Europeans have ever been before. Instead, the reasons are moral, spiritual, and religious—because we know from empirical evidence that religious people tend to have more babies than secular people. Therefore, Europe’s demographic collapse has more to do with European secularism rather than anything else.

But European secularism and atheism have another negative consequence for freedom—and it is a mentality of appeasement. By this I mean appeasement of threats to freedom. Once again, individual atheists can be very brave, indeed, and they may love freedom more than life itself, and many might be willing to risk their lives in defense of freedom rather than live in slavery; but that is not the logical implication of their world-view.

Perhaps if pushed into a corner and their only choice is either a fight or slavery, their logical conclusion would be to fight. But if there is a viable option of appeasement—of living comfortably while others are thrown to wolves—then to risk one’s own life—which, according to atheism, is the only life which exists—doesn’t make sense.

If we can live comfortably now and appease any threats that confront us—those that are small now, but

which will grow into something really dangerous only after our death—why even bother struggling against them?

To live comfortably until one dies and not worry about what, if anything, comes after it—never mind what it will be and what it could mean for future generations (if there are any)— seems to be perfectly compatible with a secular outlook. So I believe

The Cathedral of St. Vitus in Central Prague.

European secularism both leads to and nourishes European statism, as well as Europe’s demographic decline and European appeasement of foreign threats.

But I don’t like to be a prophet of European doom-and-gloom. There are fortunately healthy signs of hope in Europe. What are they? On the one hand, Central and Eastern Europe are different from Western Europe.

The last time Western Europeans experienced totalitarianism, it was 1945 and it had to do with Nazism. We Eastern Europeans had experienced Nazism in 1945,

too, but it was not the last time we experienced totalitarianism. Our last experience with totalitarianism was in 1989 under the Communism. So our memories of totalitarianism are of a more recent date—and, hence, fresher.

That’s why I am pleased that we do not share so many illusions as Western Europeans. We do not believe that we have entered a permanently peaceful Kantian world; we still remember that the world can be pretty brutal.

In fact, there are more people in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe know who to thank for our liberation from the Communist yoke of the Soviet Union. We know that we should be grateful primarily to the Great Liberator, the late President Ronald Reagan.

So it is no accident—and no surprise, either—that Central and Eastern Europeans are on average more pro-American and more sensitive about the rise of Russian neo-imperialism than Western Europeans are.

Our experience has taught us so.

On the other hand, there are positive developments in Western Europe, too. Events after September 11, 2001, have woken up many Western Europeans from their illusionfilled slumber. The murder of a movie director in the Netherlands, death threats to those who exercised their freedom of speech in Denmark and elsewhere, massive demonstrations against freedom of speech, riots, hostility towards Western and classical liberal values—these are all the wake-up calls top rouse us Europeans from the illusions of multiculturalism.

More than a few Western European friends have told me that jihadism and Islamism could be blessings in disguise—as they might bring many complacent Europeans to their senses, remind them of their philosophical, moral, and religious roots, and bring them back to the

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“The Architect’s Dream” by Thomas Cole. Oil on canvas (1840).

heritage of Western Civilization. It might force them to think again—or to think deeply for the first time— about what they have taken for granted for so long and help them realize that it is not granted at all!

They may instead realize that the freedoms they enjoy now are based on a certain anthropology, on a certain image of man as a being with inner, intrinsic dignity, a dignity that is revealed by Western religion and through the Western tradition. In other words, thinking deeply about the roots and nature of our freedoms can, in the end, make us conservatives.

Of course, the enemy we are facing in Western Europe and, more generally, in the West has two heads: One is direct, violent and lethal. It is jihadism and Islamism. The other is indirect, subversive and in the longrun just as deadly. It is the moral relativism and nihilism of the New Left.

Many peaceful Muslims would not object to the norms of JudeoChristian, Western Civilization. But they cannot not distinguish between Western Civilization and the postWestern, post-modern, anti-culture of the New Left. They consider the immorality and relativism of the New Left to be identical with Western Civilization. And that confusion pushes many of them into the arms of the jihadists. Of course, the personal immorality of others cannot justify terrorism and murder; but it certainly helps to explain why many—even moderate—Muslims remain hostile towards the West.

Hence, the task for conservative, classical liberals and all those on the Right in the West is two-fold: to defeat Islamist terrorists by the use of arms, and to defeat the nihilists and relativists through persuasion and high culture. Such a two-track strategy for victory may succeed; but

omitting either of these tracks only guarantees defeat, sooner or later.

Fortunately, there are already signs of a backlash against both Islamism and multiculturalism in Western Europe. And there is even more than just a reactive backlash.

There are active and constructive initiatives going on across Europe.

So Europe is not dead yet; Europe is not over yet; European conservatives and classical liberals have not been pushed onto the ashheap of history yet. They can have a future and they must have a future— if Europe is to have a future. In the meantime, despair is not an option but a sin.

Dr. Joch is the Executive Director of the Civic Institute in Prague. He obtained his M.D. degree from Charles University and was previously the Foreign Affairs Secretary of the Civic Democratic Party (1994-1996).

Editor-in-Chief: Alvino-Mario Fantini Editorial Board: Diederik Boomsma • Mark C. Henrie • Jonathan D. Price Published by the Center for European Renewal • P.O. Box 85633 • 2508CH The Hague • The Netherlands Donations to: ABN/AMRO Account Nr. 0601773993 • IBAN: NL71ABNA0601773993 • BIC/SWIFT: ABNANL2A. Contact: editor@europeanconservative.com / info@europeanrenewal.org

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